The descent of Women’s Day

Corporate celebration of this anniversary is hypocritical

International Women’s Day on March 8 is meant to celebrate the achievements and contributions of a gender that has a long history of oppression, and to reiterate the importance of gender equality in society. The celebration of this day has become de rigueur in India over the past six or seven years — well after the advent of Valentine’s Day and the mainstreaming of Karva Chauth and Shivratri, two festivals in popular Indian culture when wives fast for the welfare of their husbands. In that sense, the observance of Women’s Day marks a progressive step, a nod to the growing number of women in the workplace and an appropriate marker since this occasion was originally known as International Working Women’s Day — the change of label is an acknowledgement of the unpaid labour of countless housewives. The more striking point today, however, is the wholesale insincerity embedded in Women’s Day celebrations in India.

Ingrained gender discrimination in Indian society is one obvious part of the story, as so recently evidenced by the online trolling and physical harassment of a young college girl protesting against lumpenism on the Ramjas College campus. Attitudinal change in society is necessarily a gradual process. By far the bigger share of the hypocrisy must go to corporations in India, big and small, domestic and foreign, in the cynical commercial exploitation of Women’s Day to burnish their image of political correctness. A good two weeks before March 8, corporate marketing and public relations machinery swings into action. An array of consumer goods companies invariably announce the launch of products targeted at “empowering women”, from razors to sunglasses to lipsticks and garments. Many of these products are pink, when even a casual Google search could have revealed that gender equality is increasingly associated with the violet, white and green of the suffragette movement. One step up are the PR executives who importune journalists with “story opportunities”. These are essentially ways of selling their “women’s empowerment” initiatives as part of the corporate social responsibility mandate. A subset of this is the offers to interview women CEOs or men CEOs talking about women’s rights and their various efforts to promote them.

Any effort focused on women’s welfare is unexceptionable, even if it yields benefits to relatively small numbers of girls and women. The energetic efforts to publicise them, however, inevitably raise doubts about their sincerity. More so when it is evident that companies in India do not seem to do a great deal about enhancing the workplace environment for women. Data from the ministry of corporate affairs shows that though there has been a rise in the reporting of sexual harassment, more than a third of the top 100 companies listed on the National Stock Exchange do not have internal complaints committees in place as required by law and almost half of those that do have not trained members in the provisions of the law. Other dipstick surveys suggest that workplace ambience remains so hostile that women still hesitate to register complaints, preferring instead Donald Trump’s favoured solution of leaving the company. It is striking that no corporation that advertises its “women’s initiatives” ahead of Women’s Day has thought of launching an exercise to educate companies in the laws protecting women from sexual harassment in the workplace nor has corporate India, with an ever-growing cohort of women chief executives, ever considered jointly promoting the cause in, say, the way USA Inc did for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights not so long ago. That, surely, would be a more credible way of reaffirming a commitment to gender equality than any corporate self-promotion campaign.