Breaking A Bias, Easier Said
It is that time of the year when we will be bombarded with messages of how we must applaud the fighting spirit of a woman that can conquer anything and that drastic changes must be made to arrive at a diverse, equitable and inclusive for all world. International Women’s Day (IWD), celebrated on March 8, attracts a near formulaic response from all segments of the economy and society, including businesses and brands.
This is rightly so because gender parity is a conversation that needs attention, especially in a country like India, where the situation can be called discouraging from a number’s perspective. As per a Ministry of Statistics report, the female labour participation rate in India fell to 16.1 per cent during the July-September 2020 quarter. While this was seen as an outcome of the pandemic-induced unemployment crisis, it should be noted this was the lowest among major economies.
India was on a declining trend even before that. According to World Bank estimates, the female labour participation rate in India fell from more than 26 per cent in 2005 to 20.3 per cent in 2019. This was specifically demoralising given the increase in efforts, from both government and India Inc, towards growing India’s women workforce.
Against this backdrop, a day meant to recognise women’s contributions all over the world can play a part in furthering the conversation. Arguably, IWD 2022 theme, #BreakTheBias, may even give an inkling into the reason behind the deteriorating workforce parity in India, which is precisely our innate bias of what an accomplished woman should look like. Do we understand bias? A Prega News ad, #SheCanCarryBoth, released for IWD 2022, may help answer this question. Depicting a working mother, who is scoffed at by a single, elder working woman, and who then proves to be an inspiration to a younger, working woman, the ad has a very clichéd narrative.
The tagline itself is alarm bell one. She can carry both is where expectations come that she must. If she was an only career- or homefocused woman, she is half qualified. There must be a villain and in this case, it was the arrogant single, working woman. By the time we come to the younger woman who was conflicted about pregnancy because she was a model, it is just alarm bells galore. Prega, interestingly, is the same brand that tabled infertility last IWD.
Did the message not work for it to regress to the 2000s? Was this its solution ‘let’s do this something new’? Difficult to answer. But these kinds of messages highlight the biases that have been called out but are so much of second nature that they pass off as ‘inspiring’.
Lack of inclusive language, commitment behaviour and glorifying archaic ideas prove our bias is inherent. Breaking it is easier said, but it better be done if we want to progress.
