I attended a girls' college where most
of my batchmates were bouncing between three or four options – MBA
degree, teaching with a B.Ed degree, hotel management, and air
hostessing. Anyone who dreamt of travelling the world and living
independently wanted to be an air hostess. None of us dared dream of
becoming commercial pilots. A couple of girls wanted to be in the
armed forces, but they assumed they would have to quit after five or
ten years.
The funny thing was, even as we thought
of getting jobs in multinational firms or in hospitality, we tended
to focus on “decent” jobs rather than occupying positions of
power, or demonstrating leadership. None of my friends ever said that
they wanted to take over their family businesses or become CEOs. None
of them said they wanted to own an airline or a chain of hotels. None
of them said they wanted to be Vice-Chancellors of universities. Our
dreams were smaller and always, at the back of our heads, was the
thought that we would probably have to get home from office before
our future husbands did.
Life, however, has a way of upchucking
all assumptions about the self and the world. A year later, I was a
journalist, pulling long hours, going everywhere alone, often at
night, and being surprised and shocked at how systems, cities,
countries worked. I couldn't possibly have returned home to cook for
a man who worked ten-to-six, and I didn't want to. Yet, I do recall
saying to my boss, a male editor, that it was a woman who was
responsible for bringing up children. He mildly argued that a father
was equally responsible but, clueless fool that I was, I insisted
that mothering was central to parenting.
Now I blush to think of how deeply
entrenched the bias was inside my own head, and in families as
liberal as my own. In the years since, a lot of things have changed.
This is extracted from a longer column I wrote about how gender roles have evolved over the last two decades. Link here (behind a paywall): https://www.gqindia.com/content/new-roles-play-21st-century/
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