GENDER-SPECIFIC ROLES HURT US ALL

By SHAGORIKA EASWAR

With Diwali barely a few days away, my mithai-making is in full swing.

Each year, I vow that this will be the last year I do this. That next year I. Will. Pick. Up. Mithai. But as the festival comes around, I draw up long lists of ingredients, do the rounds of Indian groceries (much of it sourced online this year) and get busy.

In this, I have never had to enlist the help of my husband or our sons as they are willing volunteers. The draw being he who volunteers gets to enjoy mithai fresh off the pan!

So they pitch in, helping me chop the nuts, stir the many concoctions, clean the piles of pans and yes, taste.

But it’s not like they are MIA on other days.

My father enjoyed cooking and when we had guests over for dinner, they expected to find his signature dishes on the table. But he also often made dinner for us just to give my mother a break. I was raised in a home where there were no “girl” jobs or “boy” jobs. Whatever needed to be done was attended to by whoever happened to be around. Whether this was sweeping and mopping the floors and doing the dishes when the househelp didn’t show, or cooking. My brother continued this in his family unit as an adult.

Thus when my husband helped with household chores when we first set up a home together, I didn’t fall back in shock. In fact, I took it so much for granted that I probably didn’t even acknowledge it as such a big deal.

My father-in-law, too, unlike many men of his generation, helped my mother-in-law around the house. Specially after he retired and had more time to “properly” clean the window grills or the fans, left dusty by the househelp’s lackadaisical swipe across surfaces.

So they took my husband’s helping in their stride, too. Well, more or less. I still remember their reaction when our son’s diaper needed to be changed. On a visit back to the city I grew up in, I was busy catching up with a friend over a long phone call and my husband did the needful, as he often did. My in-laws didn’t say anything, but I caught that something was amiss from their resolutely noncommittal expression.

Daughter-in-law busy chatting up a storm while their son changed diapers? What was the world coming to?

But that was then, and I got it. What I don’t get is the reaction of some desi visitors to our home now, particularly among those visiting from India.

Some of them get supremely and visibly uncomfortable seeing my husband wield the Swiffer. The same people who lift their feet off the floor to allow me to clean around them without a murmur of protest.

An article in India Today dated October 13, 2020, refers to a survey that revealed that less than 10 per cent of Indian men are involved in household chores. 

Data shows that some 84 per cent of women’s working hours are spent on activities they do not get paid for, while for men, the reverse is true – 80 per cent of their work time is spent on activities they get paid for, wrote Rukmini S.

Countries around the world use Time Use Surveys to assess the share of time in a day groups of people spend on different activities. India’s last such survey was in 1999-2000. Then from January to December 2019, the National Statistical Office conducted the Time Use in India - 2019 survey using a nationally representative sample of over 450,000 people over the age of six, to whom questions were put about how they spend their days.

An excerpt from the article:

“Spending the majority of their time in employment does reduce the hours available for men to spend on unpaid domestic chores, but the problem goes beyond mere time availability.

“Just 6.1 per cent men participate in cooking, even if only for a few minutes a day, but 87 per cent men participate in leisure activities. Among adult women aged 15-59, however, the vast majority participate in some cooking every day. Just 8 per cent men participate in house cleaning and just 3 per cent in washing clothes.

“In places where patriarchal norms around division of labour are rigid, they create gendered spaces within the household. In many such households, if a man walks into the kitchen, it is considered odd or wrong. It isn’t paid work that is preventing them from sharing household work,” Ashwini Deshpande, professor of economics at Ashoka University and a leading feminist labour economist was quoted as saying.

I recall getting into a discussion with a cousin, visiting from India, on this. After he expressed horror at my husband’s making tea for us, I asked him if he didn’t ever make tea for his wife.

“No,” he said, firmly. “Not my department!”

He added, by way of explanation, that it’s not like he didn’t do anything around the house. “Send me to buy groceries, I can do that. But helping our kids with their homework, or cooking... that’s my wife’s job, not mine.”

And this, when his wife, too, was a senior corporate executive who put in long hours at work.

According to the India Today article, women are left with little time to socialize, eat and drink, bathe and get dressed – or even sleep.

The disparities begin from a young age. The average male child in India, aged 6-14, gets to spend more of his day on leisure and learning than his sisters, while the average girl has to spend more time on housework than her brothers. Boys are also much less likely to participate, even if only for a few minutes, on regular household chores, including cooking, cleaning and washing.

It might be too late to change those who are set in their ways, but surely we can raise our sons to be partners in the full and true sense of the word? To not only sit back and enjoy the mithai but to be men enough to know the sweet joy of helping out and doing their bit?