Women Are, Women Have

Mercy, one of the many wise and knowledgeable people at Visthar, really opened my eyes to the face of women in India and all over the world, including the US. First and foremost, women face so many struggles that men don’t have to face because of the inherent belief that men are superior in stature and strength. Men are biologically built to have more large muscles to help them to manual labor and hunt for food where women are built to have finer motor skills for doing more menial work and a higher percentage of body fat for continuing the human race. This breeds the stereotypes that men are supposed to be the breadwinners and the women’s place is in the home.

So, who works the hardest? Most women believe that men work way harder than they do. However, of all the work done in this world, women do over 60% and only get paid 10% of the world wide wages. Many more women are being encouraged to work outside of the home, yet still come home to take care of all the domestic household and child-rearing responsibilities. In India, and I suspect in many other places in the world, it is considered pretty good to have a husband who is willing to occasionally “help” in the kitchen or with other household chores.

It is technically illegal to pay women less wages, however in India and the US companies still pay women only 40% maximum of what their male counterparts make for doing the same work. The reasons for this are misconceptions that tell us that women work slower and do less work, however, when I went to a wig factory earlier this semester we witnessed the men going to their second hour long tea break of that day. These men would still work at lest 3 fewer hours than the women, getting paid significantly more and working in much cooler and cleaner spaces.

If the wage disparity isn’t enough to frustrate a person, their caste, class, ability to provide sons, and the status of their husbands also devalue a women. With so many factors connected it is hard to look at solutions for these problems without addressing everything. Another part of what Mercy talked with us about is how every issue us interconnected and trapping. Female babies are undesired because they are seen as a burden. The family pays a “handsome” fee as a dowry to the husband they decide their girl child will marry as if paying the man’s family to take on their burden. The woman is expected to be utterly submissive, produce male babies, take care of all household affairs and have dinner on the table in a timely fashion. If there is not food, she must find a way to have food there and will often go hungry because the women eat after any guests, male figures(including sons) assuming there is food(which they have made) left.

I caution all US citizens against the belief that they have equal rights because the wage disparity is ridiculous in our country, although it is illegal, and remember how big of a deal this last election was because there were finally women as major contenders? People actually asked questions about if America was ready for a female president! One problem is the stereotype that men who are ambitious are seen as go-getters where driven women are often seen as bitches. It would be nice to think of the US as a gender equal environment where people have all the same opportunities and rewards, however this is a fallacy we have yet to achieve in reality. Neither India or the US is better, or worse, they both have issues with properly valuing women.