‘Gender is a wicked problem in India’

Professor emeritus at the Indian Institute of Management (Bangalore) and former director of the Ramalingaswami Centre on Equity and Social Determinants of Health at the Public Health Foundation of India, Gita Sen’s research and work involves longstanding challenges with a high degree of difficulty: gender inequality, public health and population policies.

Ms Sen has a doctorate in economics from Stanford University, has been a visiting professor at Harvard University and was the first chairperson of the World Bank’s ‘external gender consultative group’. She has worked with the United Nations in several capacities, including as lead consultant for the UN Population Fund’s ‘India population assessment’. She is also a founder member of Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era, a global network of women scholars, researchers and activists.

In this conversation with Labonita Ghosh, Ms Sen talks about how early social imprinting of unequal gender norms is deeply embedded in Indian society, which is one reason why we fail to create opportunities for women and to protect them from gender violence that is perpetrated to “keep them in line”.

What is the critical role played by gender scholars in India today, and what is the ‘truth’ that they bring to light vis-à-vis the social development sector?

The role is the same as that of any scholar, which is to bring to light that which is not known, in this instance the nature of gender power and gender relations in society. The second point is to get people — women in particular, but also those with other minority gender identities — to take action against the negative consequences and harms caused by gender power.

The idea is to bring this to the notice of college and postgraduate students, researchers and others, to get them engaged in more analyses and activism on the subject, and to advocate with policymakers for change. Gender power and gender institutions are imprinted and embedded in society. So how do you change that? Gender and women’s studies have tried to do that since their inception in the country in the 1970s.

Gender is a prime social relationship, so it’s impossible to think of social development without thinking about gender. Health, education or human development, none of these can be tackled without giving front-and-centre attention to the way in which gender relations and power occur in society. If you talk about social development without referencing gender, things are likely to go wrong. Your understanding is likely to be limited and often misdirected.

We have by now a lot of academic and research knowledge — as well as practical and programmatic policy evidence from work on the ground — to inform us that if we don’t look at things through the lens of gender, we will miss out on critical aspects. We are likely to end up taking misdirected or wrong pathways to reach our goal.

Do you believe it’s important to embed the issue of gender in social development programmes right from the design stage? And is that happening?

Absolutely. And no, not enough of it is happening. Let’s take the provision of clean water in rural India. [Access to this] is not an engineering problem alone. It’s more than knowing where to put the handpump or where to locate the water tank so that it serves every household. It’s also about knowing the communal and caste issues in the village. You cannot put the water point at a place where only the upper castes of the village can access it.

But there’s also a gender issue here. Since it’s mainly the woman who collects water for the family, you have to make it available at a time when she can go and fetch it. If she has to set aside household tasks to do this, she will likely depute her daughter to fetch water instead of sending her to school. That’s why understanding how gender works is crucial, along with caste and economic inequality (the rich-poor divide that puts access to resources only in certain hands).

What needs to change in programme design thinking to be able to incorporate gender issues from the start?

Let’s take any programme relating to social development in water, sanitation, education or health. What are the parameters that should get built in right from the beginning? If the programme is location-specific, we would start by doing a survey of the households in the area and sort them by economic criteria (income, land ownership, consumption patterns, etc). That would give us a sense of who is deprived or marginalised in the area and how we should design a programme to serve them.

We need to think about caste and gender in the same way. We need to know the caste composition of the community to understand the nature of social relationships, and we need to know about gender norms, belief systems and behaviours. While we have methodologies to gauge economic parameters and categorise beneficiaries accordingly, we don’t have standard parameters for caste classification, although we’re improving on that.

With gender, scholars have been trying to convince people that we need a similar set of standard tools. We need to see, first, if women have control over land and resources. Are they unpaid family workers? Do they have access to bank accounts in their own name that they can use? What are their education levels? For far too long women’s work, either in the household or outside, has been negated and sometimes not considered work at all.

We have general surveys that tell us what the nature of women’s work is, but we need to know more. For instance, are they the ones fetching water, collecting fuel and taking care of the livestock? They are certainly cooking and minding the children and the elderly, but what resources do they have at their disposal? Do they have access to education and healthcare? What is the age of marriage and fertility rate in the area? Is violence — physical, psychological, emotional — used to keep girls and women subordinated and in their place?

How many social development programmes not explicitly targeted at women are designed keeping these parameters in mind? Very few. So then we’ve left out half the population from the design of a programme, and yet we talk about bringing about big changes. Improvements may happen, but they will be happenstance for women; they won’t be by design or participation.

Even today, women and Dalits sit at the back or on the edges in gram sabha (village assembly) meetings; they often don’t get a chance to participate in proceedings. Therefore, we need to get back to the drawing board and look at the gender, caste or religious dimensions of projects, instead of always only starting with economic parameters.

You have often referred to gender as a ‘wicked problem’. What does that mean?

Wicked problems are those that are hard to tackle and difficult to change. Gender is imprinted in us from a very early age; it’s built into everything we do. At age two or three, there are no normative differences in the way boys and girls are treated. The girl, as with the boy, will not be told to sit in a particular way or forbidden from running around and playing. But come age four, five or six, the little girl may be handed a small broom and told to sweep the courtyard. This while her brother continues to play with his friends.

Gender norms for the way a girl or boy should be, or the things they can do, are imprinted that early. By the time they are nine or ten, kids are no longer children; they are boys or girls. By the time they hit puberty they have been fully assimilated into the gender system. The same happens with caste, which is also imprinted early. That’s why caste is also a wicked problem.

If we leave it to society on its own to change these wicked problems, it will never happen. We need active intervention to change social relations. But the common dilemma is: should gender be a track by itself or should it be mainstreamed into everything? I feel it needs to be mainstreamed into our work on ageing, for example, our work on technology, and certainly our work in education.

Is the problem of unpaid women’s labour at the heart of gender issues?

It’s a very important issue because society still does not accept that the care of human beings should be a social project. And by care I mean childbearing and the feeding, care and raising of human beings; of taking care of their health and their old age. These are not considered as social responsibilities but private ones. But if it is a private responsibility, who’s doing it? If it’s being done in the home, it’s being done largely by women and it’s unpaid.

Can we find redress for this?

It requires re-imprinting, a recognition of the problem and a willingness to change it. But this hasn’t yet happened anywhere in the world, not even in the Scandinavian countries that are supposed to be good on gender equality.

There was a study conducted in Sweden that measured the stress levels of managers over the course of the day to gauge at which times they were the most or least stressed. It did this by measuring their cortisol levels [cortisol is known as a stress hormone] and the subjects, both men and women, were from the same managerial strata. The study found that with male managers the stress levels would start rising as they got to work and then peak around noon. After lunchtime, it would plateau and then start coming down by the end of the workday. There was just one single peak.

With women managers, however, the study found two peaks in a day: the first corresponded with that of the men and the second was at the end of the workday, when their stress levels would shoot up again. This was because for women a second workday started when they left their office. They would have to shop, get dinner going at home, manage the kids’ homework and such. So ‘womens’ work’ is something that needs to be addressed collectively and consistently, not just as a matter of health and human rights, but also as an issue of social health and social rights.

Unfortunately, the way this wicked problem is currently dealt with in society is through gender violence (or the fear of it): to ensure that women stay in line. An extreme form of this plays out when women run away or elope with someone from a different caste or religion. The brutality with which they are often made to pay for this is an example. And who is that brutality meted out by? Their fathers, brothers and other male (and sometimes female) members of the family. Just like caste, gender is also policed in society with the threat of, or actual, violence.

Should we, then, have more programmes that ensure sensitisation and protection of women from sexual violence?

Most gender violence is perpetrated by people known to the woman, and much of it takes place at home. The girl may be sexually abused by her father, brother or other male relatives. We get horrified by incidents like the Nirbhaya rape and murder or the RG Kar Hospital case, but there has been sexual violence around caste forever in India. The first factor we have to recognise is the locus of violence, or where the bulk of it is taking place.

There are some programmes, like the World Health Organization working with CEHAT in Mumbai, to ensure that the healthcare system does a better job of recognising and handling gender violence when it occurs. Most people, when they see a domestic violence victim with a black eye and bruises all over her body, back off, saying it’s a family matter. But that’s what needs to change. Such violence, though, is just the tip of the iceberg. There is a much bigger mass, called gender inequality, that lies beneath that surface.