Thirty years ago, this was just the beginning of a journey for me. A good fraction of people choosing academic careers in India typically enter the modern equivalent of a "gurukul" thereafter. Since many of our top universities and research institutes are residential, a person like me often end up spending the rest of his/her working life in academic campuses.
I went to IIT-Kanpur for my M.Sc, after completing B.Sc. from Presidency College. The f/m ratio in our class was not too different from that in the Presidency College. But there was one difference. This time we were actually doing better than the institute average (1 in 10). The reason being the reduced strength of humanities departments (there were no undergraduate students in the few humanities departments that did exist in IITs those days) and a complete absence of biological sciences.
Our PhD class in IISc, Bangalore was not bad. In fact, the fraction of women was 30%. This number is of some real significance. At this year's annual meeting of the Astronomical Society of India at IISER-Mohali, Dr. Preeti Kharb, a colleague and friend from Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore presented some statistics from all over the world. It appears that the fraction of women in science at the PhD level (which we can consider as the entry level for a career in academia) is about 30% for most of the advanced countries as well.
So we are not doing too badly at this level. The fact that the fraction progressively dwindles to much lower values as one goes higher up in the career ladder is, of course, a different story altogether (shall discuss this in a separate post). But the essence of all this is that we, women in academia, are a total minority. And are expected to remain so in the foreseeable future.
When the sex-ratio is this dismal at the student level, it is quite natural that most of our teachers have also been male. Consequently, we have had more male friends, collaborators, colleagues, mentors than female. Not surprisingly, most women also tend to pick up spouses from their own fraternity while most of their male counterparts need to look elsewhere.
The upshot of all this, combined with campus living, implies that most women in academia spend their entire adult life surrounded by twice (or more) as many men than women. And people as lazy as myself (or my husband) also typically combine their vacations with working visits to other institutes and consequently hardly ever go out of the community (barring rare once a year visit to the family home or such like). Meaning, we only see folks from our own academic community (of course, their spouses + children too), which is more than two-thirds male.
So we get more than our fair share of men around us than an average woman in another profession or from a previous era. And my opinion of these men - in roles ranging from classmates, friends, teachers, collaborators, students, spouses (and very recently as fathers too) - is pretty positive.
We need to remember that these men were raised by mothers who were women of a different era. Those women never dreamed of jeans-clad 'badhu-mata's (daughter-in-law) scooting away for days on end leaving the care of the household (+ young children) at the hands of their husbands. Or that the men of the house would have to learn changing diapers from day one, or take up kitchen duties as and when required. Or that they would need to handle the tricky situation of mentoring young, impressionable girl students going through certain emotional rough patches! Basically, the mothers of today's men had no clue about the kind of demands that would be made of their sons, be it at the workplace or at home.
Women have traditionally been expected to learn the ropes and survive through every possible adverse situation. But nobody thought that men too would be in need of survival training to plod through the mundane household chores or to walk the emotional minefields at workplace.
Given this tremendous handicap, I find men doing exceedingly well all around me. The constant complaints about men not contributing as much towards household chores is also a bit of a myth really. In academia, most people spend a few years abroad during their post-doctoral phase. This is when they are most likely to have a young child. Invariably, men get to do the dishes (or other work of similar nature) in every family. Because they never train for household work, they automatically get assigned to the most menial of tasks. Such humility from the section who have always been used to lord over everyone and everything is so refreshing. Difficult to visualise Indian men of a previous generation fitting into such roles.
They also take a serious interest in their children and spend real quality time working on that. A friend of mine, despite being a very busy scientist, is actually going through a series of children's books by Roald Dahl because his young daughter is now reading them. And he would like to be in touch with her interests. When we were young, many fathers were not even aware of the class in which their children were studying till they were close to their first big board exam!
We do find ourselves in a difficult situation. After all, women went through a very rapid and very major transformation both in their perceived and actual roles in recent decades. Whereas the men have neither been completely aware of and have been even less prepared for the required paradigm shift. But we need to remember that while these are the men who have helped us being where we are today, they are also the same people who are facing certain existential challenges without anyone wishing to acknowledge their problems.
So how can we remedy the situation? After all, these are our men - our friends, colleagues, teachers, boyfriends, husbands, brothers.. And it's actually the previous generation of women who have left these men in the lurch. It only befits us, the women of the current generation, to be a little sympathetic while they adjust to their new roles. Bring your men upto scratch, and that would be the best service you can render to the next generation who, hopefully, would not have any need for a thought like this.
Note : The discussion here pertains only to a certain section of Indian society (mainly middle class folks in and around academia) and does not refer to situations prevailing elsewhere.
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