Telling Tall Tales is a fortnightly column by Tara Krishnaswamy on matters that matter.
There was hurrah for parity recently, as female enrolment in colleges touched 48% of overall numbers, per the All India Survey on Higher Education. That enrolment of girls in high school matched or superseded that of boys is also cause for cheer. It is another matter that the female ratio in higher education is heavily skewed towards the arts, humanities, medicine, and sciences, while technology, engineering, law, etc., continue to groan under off-kilter testosterone.
It has taken us 75 odd years of investment in public education to achieve this quantum milestone, notwithstanding the quality of outcomes. This hill has been scaled, huffing and puffing, with high school budgets that are gender-agnostic. Over the decades, girls' average enrolment lagged by 15-20% points, and was worse within oppressed castes, marginalised tribes, Muslims, and other vulnerable communities. We have learned that this is because of lack of sanitation, distance to school, safe transport and lack of female teachers — socio-economic problems that vary by cohort.
The price of gender-blind policy is that decades of girls were, and are, left behind.
All things being equal, Rs 100 spent by the State towards education or any public good, should reach all sections of society equally — all communities, across all locations, all genders, castes, and tribes. However, that is not so, as outcomes make evident. All things are not equal.
Women and men may enrol equally in college, but cultural norms that socialise choice narrow that pipe, so hardly 20-25% of those who graduate end up in formal labour. So the Rs 100 spent by the State to enable labour, reaches men in higher measure. This isn't just about one or two domains of policy.
Road real estate is hogged by cars, and large vehicles, while smaller vehicles like motorbikes and scooters, occupy far less space; pedestrians consume trivial road-space. The vast majority of cars and large vehicles are driven by men. The far fewer women on the road are either on small vehicles, public transit, or foot, therefore edged out, although roads are built for universal access. So, road budgets largely benefit men.
Sports fields and stadiums are overwhelmed by men and older boys. Beyond walking hours and children's play times, parks are where men spread. Trees, stores, and street corners are male hovering spaces, and bus stands and markets are where they loiter day and night. Women and girls, autonomously, do occupy some of these spaces, for some of the time and in smaller numbers, weighed down by cultural mores, concerns for safety, homebound care-giving and family commitments, and lack of access to spending money of comparable dimensions. Again, socio-economic constraints vary by cohort. So, for every gender-blind Rs 100 allocated to public goods, only around Rs 10-30 actually reach women.
So, what is the effect of gendered policy-making?
A stunning display of the effect of gender-aware policy is the overnight pouring of women into buses in states that permit free transit for them. Where women's occupancy was a third or less in a gender-blind bus system, they are now at par or the majority. Economic realities had pent up women's mobility, and nothing else changed culturally or legally to liberate it. All that was tweaked was the gender-orientation of the policy budget, which has now equalised that public good.
Ditto for female voting percentage. It soared from a 10-15% point gap since 2009, to match or even exceed the male voting percentage in some districts. The specific targeting of the female vote by political parties and various measures by the Election Commission, including gender-segregated voting lines that prevented intentional and unintentional physical contact by men, pink booths, enhancing voting hours, registering of transgender voters, etc., wooed them.
It needed gender-specific actions for voting rights to be equally available to all genders, while hitherto, the gender-blind universal right was quite selective. As both the above examples show, gender-blind policies go only so far. Allocated budgets do not reach everyone equally.
Women’s access to and consumption of public goods is spatially and temporally constrained, not by law, but by mores and socio-economic realities. Therefore, law, policy, and budgets cannot be distributed equally, for culturally and socio-economically, people are not equal. The lag is greater by gender, intersected with oppressed castes and communities. When policy breaks free of neutrality and climbs that stool of equity, it levels the field for universal access to public goods.
Doing nothing does not naturally converge disparities, instead, they multiply. Absence of female commuters and engineers has resulted in male-dominated bus design that is too high for women to climb into and hold overhead. Paucity of women in engineering has designed cars that ill-fit the female height and weight, from out of reach controls to killer airbags. Low levels of women in workplaces and public places means they are not safe enough. Low inclusion of women in urban planning has made pedestrian facilities in cities extinct, as the vast majority of women walk, travel short haul, and use public transport. Lack of testing of pharmaceuticals on women, despite the ocean of differences between male and female physiology, means live testing, and more poison than antidote.
In the future, things will get combinatorially worse. The gap in smart phone ownership and internet access, added to gaps in female labour force participation, access to money, usage of fin-tech, and enrolment in STEM means that the new world of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is being groomed using the same masculine tricks that created an ugly, exclusionary old world.
Even as envious men pay for buses that are free for women and feel outnumbered, they must realise how it is for women everyday, and everywhere, outside the home. The world is unfairly masculine, and this cannot lazily be relegated to biological differences. Budgets allocated to all don't reach women. City budgets, education budgets, health budgets, and others that are meant to be universal, need to be audited, dissected, and disaggregated by gender. That will show that a disproportionate amount of public good serves only, or largely, males.
As evidence shows, gender-aware policy unleashes female aspirations and talent. If not, it may never bridge for the foreseeable future, as in the case of sports and formal jobs. There is a real price to it, and not just for women, but for India's economy, society, growth and development.
The basic lesson isn't that one demographic needs to be indulged forever, but that policy needs to to fit society and its economy. The public in “public good” are not uniform, and therefore, governance needs to heed differences, and design and budget policies to address that. If we remove those tunnel-vision goggles and view the IMAX screen instead, it becomes plain that when public policies are gender-neutral, they may, in fact, lead to gendered outcomes.
Tara Krishnaswamy is a political creature with an urge to write. She works on political and policy communication.