What do Indian men want? Apparently, not a wife who works. A recent survey, ‘Women’s Work, Social Norms and the Marriage Market’, by researchers from the Indian Statistical Institute, Harvard, Oxford and Ashoka University found that for suitors of above-average education and wealth, especially in North India, working women are a no-no. After all, how can the comfort of being a double-income household compare to hot rotis on demand, prepared by loving hands? The sacrifice of the woman’s aspirations, presumably, is a small price to pay.
What the survey really shows is that even as Indian women make a mark beyond their home and hearth, including in areas that remain male-dominated, men remain stuck in a man-hunts-woman-nests fantasy and stereotype that is long past its sell-by date. Indian women are rapidly making up for a long history of being rendered “the second sex”, leaving their male partners at a loss in a world that is, almost suddenly, no longer theirs to inherit. A week ago, it was reported that the first woman officer in the Indian Air Force’s 90-year history is leading a frontline combat unit. Women’s enrollment in IITs increased to 20 per cent in 2021-22 from 8 per cent in 2016. By 2021, the percentage of women in senior management positions in India was above the global average (31 per cent) at 39 per cent — making India the third-ranked globally for women in senior positions.
These are changes that, as the survey makes evident, Indian men are struggling to process. The women they hope to marry would much rather climb the professional ladder than be the “angel in the home”. Perhaps if men attempted to understand and express this gulf in expectations, it might help them adjust to reality better — and find true companionship too.
