Corporate gender responsibility: Stop pink-washing it
Come Women’s Day, many companies jump onto the bandwagon of diversity and inclusion, often through well-crafted but clichéd advertisements that feature women overcoming regressive situations. A case in point is the new advertisement of a service company that advocates dignity of labour for women professionals who work in salons. The ad features a young salon professional wearing company colours who drives home in a car and has to face an angry younger brother, smarting from the ridicule he has been subjected to by “bade
bhaiyyas” in their building. The young boy recounts how the older boys brand his sister a “massage-waali,” casting aspersions on her profession and insinuating that she can afford a car because of the “happy endings” she specializes in for customers. The young boy’s outburst leads to the daughter looking at her mother, who turns away. The woman slowly proceeds to unpack the biases inherent in the older boys’ narrative and observes how a woman’s success is accompanied by people’s thinking (soch) becoming narrower (chhoti). All is well that ends well, with the boy smiling, having learnt the lesson!
Such commercials trivialize the problem of female stigmatization, with their sexual innuendos and mechanistic solutions. This trivialization is evident in the suggestion that it is older boys who have primitive notions. In a sense, it normalizes the gender identities of the stigma perpetrators, suggesting that women do not stigmatize—a huge myth. The ad also reinforces the image of older women as being helpless and hapless, although it preaches the value of dignity of labour right at the end. In an era when even consumerproduct companies are moving away from objectifying women in their promotional material, it is strange that a service company still feels the need to scream from rooftops about the chastity of the work done by its professionals.
The role of framing and anchoring in guiding human choice is well understood. Service jobs like those of masseurs, beauticians or even flight attendants have been looked down upon in the past as unfit for women from ‘good families.’ However, that past was synonymous with a different India. India’s service economy is significantly being driven by women today. So a Women’s Day message needs, if at all, positive framing to capture the role of women in contemporary India. Content created in ad agencies and corporate offices which neglects societal change only reinforces old stereotypes and renders a huge disservice to our slow but certain social transformation. With the service sector offering a gamut of opportunities to women in the hinterland and Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, it is unfortunate that service-sector companies do not always see how their marketing efforts could either worsen the gender scenario or play a positive role in shaping perceptions.
A deeper concern pertains to such advertisements being manifestations of a wider problem of pink-washing the ‘diversity, equality and inclusion’ agenda that corporates are under increasingly intense scrutiny for.
The service company in question has been in the news in the past few years for all the wrong reasons. Its ‘partners’— many of them women gig workers—have protested an unfair mandate it has imposed on them, citing fresh rules. These ‘partners’ face arbitrary ID blocking, unrealistic rating and response-rate requirements, and an expanding geographical radius for off-site jobs to be done. Many of these women had opted to be gig workers based on the perceived flexibility and autonomy associated with signing up with the platform. While the company has successfully adopted technology to improve its business performance, it is understandably being criticized by its women partners. Its app has features like “auto acceptance,” which lets the company manipulate work assignments to prioritize its productivity goals over the well-being of its workers.
Messages that claim to advocate women’s dignity of labour in certain professions do more harm than good. In the case outlined above, it acquires a worse tone in the context of the advertiser’s gig labour practices involving women.
Commercials that hit the wrong notes risk coming across as disingenuous and hypocritical, undermining the credibility of the company’s commitment to gender equality and fair treatment of workers.
The case of the gig-work platform highlights the need for greater transparency in corporate actions and accountability for the same. While celebrating Women’s Day and promoting gender equality through their advertising, companies must ensure that their workplace policies and practices are duly aligned with these values. A failure to do so would only lead to allegations of pinkwashing, eroding trust among employees and multiple other stakeholders.
In today’s era of heightened corporate social responsibility and accountability, companies can ill afford to engage in superficial gestures of empowerment without addressing the underlying issues of gender discrimination and exploitation at the workplace. Genuine efforts to promote dignity of labour and gender equality require concrete actions, including fair wages, safe working conditions and opportunities for career advancement that are open to all employees, regardless of gender and job category. And it doesn’t need an internationally marked day on the calendar to initiate such actions.