Why Not Women?

The fine line between difference and discrimination

All that open space, and no one there to tell me it was not mine to take.

A playground with no girls

The other day I was just passing by a street on my way to the gym, and it is this nice, medium-sized play area for kids, and there were these little boys playing on the ground, running around and completely lost in their own game, but strangely there were no little girls around at all, and I do not know why but it stayed with me the whole way there.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised it is not just that playground, because even today, girls are not encouraged to play sports the way boys are, and boys are almost never enrolled in dance classes, and we just accept it, we do not even question it, we behave as though this is simply the way things are meant to be.

This is urban India, really?

And the thing that honestly shocks me the most is that this is urban India, and we have come so far, we have become so much more open and modern, we love to say how progressive we are now, and in so many ways we truly are, but these subtle things, these small everyday things, they still persist, and that is exactly what unsettles me, because it tells me the conditioning never really left us, it only got harder to see.

Look a little closer

And if you really look, if you look closely at the small, ordinary, everyday parts of our lives, you will start to see it everywhere. Think about what happens when guests come over, because the men sit down and they talk and they relax, while the women are in the kitchen, cooking and serving and running back and forth, making sure everyone is fed and looked after, and we do not even find it strange anymore, it is just how it has always been.

Then, think about all the tea shops and the little roadside stalls full of men, standing around for hours, sipping their chai and gossiping and laughing and passing the whole evening like they have all the time in the world, but where are the women? Why do we almost never see women just sitting together like that, with nowhere to be and nothing to prove, simply enjoying each other and the afternoon?

Yes, of course, women sit together in cafés, and at parties, and in all the nice, posh, modern places, and we point to that, and we feel so proud, like look how free our women are now. But why only there? Why only in the places that look good and feel modern and safe? Why not on a granular level, in the everyday, ordinary, unglamorous corners of life, the kitchen and the courtyard and the corner tea shop, where the real texture of our days actually lives?

Even the summer is not ours

Now, let me talk about something so small that we have stopped even noticing it, which is the simple act of getting dressed in the morning. Because so many of us still carry a shrug or a dupatta everywhere we go, even in the peak of summer, even when it is far too hot for it, because heaven forbid a woman wear a simple top and just feel the air on her arms with full freedom. The only place you feel even halfway safe is inside your own car, and even then, the moment you stop at a traffic signal, there is a man in the vehicle next to you peering in through your window like it is his god-given right. So tell me again how free we are.

“But my son has to work”

I still remember being a kid, and a friend’s mother saying to my mother, so casually, that even if your daughter does nothing in life, it is perfectly fine, but my son, he has to work, he has to earn, he has to make something of himself. As if my entire future was a kind of optional hobby, and his was the only one that actually counted.

Well. Years later, I ended up building a life in France, fell apart and then kept going ahead in life, and he ended up in Germany, and so what? I earn my own money, and I have never once expected anyone else to pay my way. I carry every bit as much responsibility as any man does. I am the only child of my parents, I have travelled across so many countries entirely on my own, and I have lived alone for years, and I never once made a sound about how hard any of it was. I just did it.

“She will only get married anyway”

If you want to see exactly where all of this begins, just look at how families still decide to spend their money on their children, because even now, so many families will happily send their sons to private schools while the daughters are placed in government ones, and they will spend on the boy’s tuition and his coaching and his whole future without question, but for the girl, somehow there is always less, somehow the money runs a little thinner. The reason given for all of it, again and again, is the same tired sentence: that she is only going to get married anyway, so what is the point of spending on her?

So we decide, before she has even grown up, that she is not worth the investment, and then years later we act surprised, or worse, we act threatened, when she goes out and earns her own living and builds her own life and needs absolutely no one’s permission to do it.

The pressure, apparently

Still, somehow, it is the men who keep telling us about pressure. Oh, the pressure they carry, the terrible burden of having to go out and earn. And honestly, I want to laugh, because let us actually look at who is carrying what.

Because in this country, so many women are kept out of paid work to begin with, and we love to read that as them simply choosing to stay home, simply opting out, when the truth is the choice was never really theirs to make. And then the very same women are handed almost all of the unpaid work on top of it, hours and hours of it every single day, all the cooking and the cleaning and the running of the entire home and the looking after of everyone, work that nobody counts, and nobody pays for, and nobody even sees, while the men do a tiny fraction of it. So a woman is pushed out of earning, and then buried under everything invisible, and then told, with a perfectly straight face, that she is the one without any pressure.

And that is before we even count the rest of it, because a woman earns, and she bleeds every single month, and she runs the home, and she carries everyone’s feelings, and she takes care of every single person around her, and she does all of it while being told to expect absolutely nothing in return.

How a girl learns to shrink

Do we ever stop and realise the damage we are doing to these kids? Because honestly, I really feel like we do not. As a young adult, when I look back now, I can see so clearly how women were conditioned, slowly and constantly, to believe certain things about ourselves, and we absorbed all of it every single day without ever realising it was happening to us.

I think about how a girl grows up feeling anxious, anxious about the questions of a relative or a close family member, questions about what she is doing with her life and about her body and about when she will finally settle down, questions that a boy her age would almost never be asked, and yet somehow she is the one expected to have all the answers and to apologise for the ones she does not have.

How does all of that translate when she finally grows up? It translates into a woman who second-guesses herself, who shrinks before she even speaks, who has been carrying this weight since she was a little girl and does not even remember a version of herself that existed before it.

I know I was lucky, because I grew up with so much integrity and a strong sense of who I am, and I had the space to hold on to it, but I keep thinking about everyone else around me, about the girls who were not so lucky, and about the psychological impact all of this creates, because it is real and it is heavy and we hand it out so unfairly and so young.

Difference, or discrimination?

And this is the thing I keep coming back to, this fine line between difference and discrimination, because difference is real and difference is beautiful, not every girl wants to play football and not every boy wants to dance, and that is completely okay, but the moment we stop letting children show us who they are and start deciding it for them is the exact moment it stops being difference and turns into discrimination. Because the truth is, we are not simply noticing a difference, we are creating one, we are drawing the line ourselves and then pretending we found it already there.

It hurts the boys just as much, because the little boy who is pulled away from the dance class is also being told who he is not allowed to be, that softness is not for him, that gentleness and grace are not for him, and so we take the boldness out of the girls and the tenderness out of the boys, and then we turn around and act as though they were simply born this way.

What I keep coming back to

So I keep thinking about that playground and those little girls who were not in it. Honestly, I do not believe most of us are doing this on purpose. I think we are just passing down what was passed down to us, mostly out of love and mostly without thinking about it at all.

I really do believe that the kindest thing we can ever do for our children is to stop deciding who they are before they even get the chance, and to let the girl run onto the field if she wants to, and to let the boy dance if the music moves him.

And to simply let them be exactly who they are, because the differences that are left after that, the real ones, the ones they choose for themselves, are the only ones that ever truly mattered, and everything else was never a real difference at all, it was only a line we drew, and lines can always be unlearned.