Opinion This Women’s Day, let’s talk about masculinity

It is not enough to celebrate more women in decision-making roles. One only needs to observe insensitive comments by the female leadership of the National Commission for Women (NCW) to know this, or the sustained gender-based wage gap in companies led by women, or how poorly some self-proclaimed feminist achievers treat their assistants and rivals, or read recent judgments written by women judges about single women. The focus should be on representing a diversity of lived experiences, hiring and promoting those with enough emotional literacy, and offering decision-makers training and tools to check their own privilege, while holding positions of authority. A feminised society would wholeheartedly and rigorously recognise diversity, not casually catalogue bodies to tick boxes in an annual report.

The work of sociologists such as Michele Lamont is most helpful here. She defines recognition as an affirmative act, whereby we acknowledge the positive qualities of people and communities. Stigmatisation is the opposite of recognition, actions that perpetuate negative connotations about certain social groups. In her new book, Seeing Others: How to Redefine Worth in a Divided World, Lamont pushes us to think through what she describes as “recognition gaps,” defined as “disparities in worth and cultural membership between groups in a society.” She argues our contemporary times are exaggerating these recognition gaps by centring competitive hustling, socioeconomic status, and complete self-reliance as criteria of self-worth, thereby stigmatising those who struggle to access a level playing field. Her work highlights how institutions can serve as “buffers or scaffolding to provide recognition to stigmatised groups”. In India, stigma rules — from the way women are cast in court judgments to the way we treat minorities and the marginalised. This would imply that in calls for affirmative action, women from historically marginalised and stigmatised communities should be recognised as foremost claimants.

A long-run route to feminise our institutions lies in how we teach children and youth to tackle difference and recognise each other, especially amongst our elite. For the past two years, I have been interviewing middle-aged men in positions of authority in businesses and bureaucracies. Most live in a world of abundance, and yet have been taught the mindset of scarcity and the will to dominate in all-boys schools. They are from families where their mothers or sisters have never forged a career. Their admiration for those beyond their own communities is limited to sportsmen, or men trained in the same schools and colleges as them. They enjoy the company of men and women just like them, and their circle of belonging has remained small and contained. When I asked them about their favourite writers or thinkers, none mentioned reading any Indian women or non-Brahmins. The progressives confessed that they struggled to believe women faced challenges in the economy till their daughters started working outside the home. Feminists highlight how women learn to “read” or “speak” men. A feminised society would inculcate similar empathetic capacities in young men.

Second, a country can only be feminised if its economy truly values the labour of care. A masculine culture of unhealthy competition and comparison yields an unhealthy obsession with the self. Scholar of morality, Nel Noddings, reminds us that caring is characterised by a “move away from self”. A feminised society would recognise and confer social value upon this gesture. Indian women spend twice as much time as men do on unpaid caregiving activities. Forty-eight per cent of urban women reported household duties and childcare as a bottleneck to their economic participation. Frontline care workers (ASHAs, Anganwadi workers) remain overburdened, underpaid and unprotected. Most domestic workers face abuse and low pay. Moreover, the modern economy forces women to face harsh trade-offs between care and career. Men — across castes and faiths — rarely face this binary. Policy must ease this trade-off — spend more on the care economy, pay care workers adequately, value social workers as much as we value engineers, offer women longer tenures in their careers to compensate for the time lost during maternity, or scale up income transfers to women for the invisible care they provide.

Finally, a feminised society would assure safety and safety nets for everyone. It would not tolerate neglect, cruelty or bullying. Bean counting can help here — only 11.75 per cent of our police force is female, 56.5 per cent of women earning a “regular wage or salary” outside agriculture are not eligible for any social security. Yet, our elite continues to fret about “freebies”. A universal system of economic assurance and risk insurance for those facing hard times is a vital act of care that the state apparatus can and ought to perform.

All this will sound wishy-washy to those who have spent too much time in the cynical corridors of boys’ clubs. It is far easier to hand out trophies, patronage and praise to female champions. However, as our state and institutions struggle to be gentle or caring, we must recognise that the envy, vanity and aggression driving our culture need a feminist antidote. The crisis of Indian masculinity — in our men and women — is failing all our pillars of society. Feminism helps us address the hollowness of “empowerment” without empathy. A feminised India would liberate the conversation on equality from the language of tokenism, zero-sum games and power.

Bhattacharya is an economist and author. Views are personal.