Is it because we aren’t educated or qualified enough? We don’t have the liberty to work? We are told that we should stay at home and take care of the children? We feel it’s not safe for us to step out of our homes?
According to a report on the advancing of women’s equality in the Asia-Pacific region, submitted by consultants at McKinsey & Company, women only make up for 25% of the total workforce in India.
Why is it the way it is?
The problem starts early on, with the birth of a girl into the family; when her role is predetermined. She’ll grow up, study, turn 18, get married and have kids.
Our marital status has been taking precedence over our educational qualifications and ambitions for decades now, if not centuries.
It starts at the grass root level.
In rural India, which makes up a large part of our demography, a girl is automatically made to work in the house while only the boy is sent to study.
And this is how it continues to remain.
After marriage, even in urban India, women are primarily seen as caregivers and homemakers as opposed to career-oriented breadwinners.
According to Yale University:
Because of the above statistics, in a professional environment, once a woman gets married, she’s less likely to score a promotion over her male colleagues, whose marital status somehow never comes into question.
It is generally assumed in our society that our priorities shift from professional to familial eventually.
The workplace has never been equal for and fair to women, and it goes beyond wage gaps, marital status and educational qualifications.
In 2012, the Chamber of Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India revealed that employers prefer hiring men over women because they want someone who could work at odd hours; because of which women missed out on more opportunities.
Women safety remains yet another question that has been unanswered for years now.
And instead of trying to fix what’s wrong with the country, the government, time and again opts to moral police instead of actually implementing regulations.
Should a woman’s professional duties really be the reason why she isn’t safe in her own country?
Social stigmas and norms, along with the fact that our education system is terribly biased towards the male child, make it extremely difficult for us to emerge beyond our so-called familial boundaries.
Till the system doesn’t evolve and reforms are not put into place, we will continue to be seen as child-bearers, homemakers and peacekeepers in a family.
