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The video seems to celebrate that most women can (or have to) single-handedly manage care work and employment. It talks about nazariya, making it an individual issue and not a social one. Women are thus seen as atomised entities who must learn to embrace motherhood while managing demanding professions. In other words, women’s attempts to achieve ‘equality’ has to be at the cost of undermining the question of ‘difference’, and not have it recognised through public policies. It reminds one of Wollstonecraft’s dilemma that expects women to “become men” to achieve equality, or have their ‘differences’ recognised and remain lesser citizens.A little unboxing of this ‘managing both’ in the context of India with macro data might be useful to understand what it implies for women.According to data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), women in India spend about 5.8 hours or 352 minutes a day on domestic work. This is about 577 per cent more than men, who spend about 52 minutes in a day on the same.Compared to BRICS countries for which data is available, this is 40 per cent more than what women in South Africa and China spend. This indicates a severe ‘time poverty’ for women who in the process of balancing might be required to give up on rest and leisure, with severe consequences for their physical and emotional well-being.It is therefore perhaps not a random occurrence that India has one of the lowest female labour force participation rates globally. The emphasis on women’s role as mothers, caregivers and solely responsible for domestic work haunts employment decisions.The World Bank data for 2020 illustrates that only 19 per cent of women in India are in the labour force, a fall from 26 per cent in 2005. In comparison to India, the female labour participation rate is 30.5 per cent in Bangladesh and 33.7 per cent in Sri Lanka.
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It is imperative to have policies that propel gender equality movement forward in India
