Eyes Speak Lies ...

Gender At Work In IIT Kanpur

This is a project report for a research project that Anurag Bhatt (3rd year Mechanical Engineering, IIT Kanpur) and I did for a course on Feminist Theory and Literature last semester, under Dr. Suchitra Mathur. We've tried not to make it boring. So please continue reading. We promise it'll not read like a normal report does.

Coming into our third year of stay at IIT Kanpur, we felt really removed from a section of the campus community - the faculty. We felt that coming to IIT Kanpur was not only about getting grades, jobs and degrees. The purpose of our stay was to learn, without limiting the scope of the word, and to leave this place as wiser and better-informed individuals. In this respect, we felt, we were failing. Although we were learning about the technical aspects of our own fields, we hardly got to share anything about life with our professors, and learn from their experiences. All we knew about our faculty members was what they would show us during classes. We wanted to get a more complete picture, look into a facet of their lives that goes relatively unnoticed, without, of course, prying into their personal lives. There are certain assumptions regarding the institute, its faculty and how they conduct themselves. For instance, our parents perceive the members of the faculty as being extremely rational people, and there are notions that they so act in their personal life as well. We wanted to see if the reality maps on to that image or not.

We wanted to talk to the faculty about their professional lives, their career choices, the impact of the move to IIT Kanpur on their lives, and also how their spouses cope with this change and the subsequent campus life, both personally and professionally. In recent times, there has been a lot of hue and cry about the role of gender stereotyping at workplaces and in private lives, of predefined gender roles and internalization of identities constructed socially. We wanted to observe if gender played a defining role in the kind of choices that people on campus made and to what extent, or if certain factors like job satisfaction, social life etc. transcended the boundaries of gender altogether.

Once decided, the next problem was to close in on certain faculty members based on specific criteria and to convince them to talk to us. We had to have a certain uniformity in the sample that we interviewed, both with respect to faculty-spouse and male-female ratios. We defined categories of faculty members, both male and female, based on what their spouses were doing after coming to IITK. Simply put, the categories were – spouses who were working fulltime earlier and now worked either fulltime, part-time or did not work at all.

The definition of work that we began with, as our starting point, was a capitalist one, where work is what one is paid for, or even if one is self-employed, the work is accompanied with some sort of remuneration. We had thought of more contemporary definitions as well, that would have incorporated the recent claims about household work being work, where work is something that is productive rather than something that induces income in terms of cash. With that definition of work, it would have been difficult to define categories, and hence we stuck to the capitalist definition and expected to face some flak for submitting to age old norms. Contrary to our expectations, this definition was hardly contested by those we interviewed.

All said, the interviews came with relative ease. We got to see an entirely different viewpoint of faculty members and their spouses on life in general and campus life in particular. They stepped off the pedestal on which we put them, which makes them appear inaccessible, and spoke with élan. In a lot of ways, it was one of the most humbling experiences of our short lives and left us amazed, awestruck. Our respect for them multiplied manifold.

Once we finished with all our interviews, there were certain things that were very apparent in all of them. Some were expected, others, shocking. One fact that was repeated over and over again was that faculty spouses were not at all satisfied with their professional lives here. The move to IITK had not been rewarding for them in any way, either in terms of monetary/financial gains, or as a source of job satisfaction. The job opportunities on campus, as well as in the city, can be termed as virtually non-existent. Most people gravitate towards school-teaching jobs in the city due to the ease of getting them, or some get absorbed as Project Assistants/Research Engineers on campus, but that is far from fulfilling professionally, in view of the academic qualifications they hold, in the opinion of those we interviewed.

Another issue that manifested itself in rather obvious gender-specific terms was the practice of a break in professional life. Almost every woman we interviewed had had a six- month to twenty-four month break in her career, for reasons other than motherhood. In most cases, their career wasn’t deemed as important since they did not ‘need’ to work as such. Such examples were not found with their male counterparts. In quite a few cases, the women had to sit and wait for a job opportunity, simply because none was available at the place where the husband worked, or because they were at least ready to wait, if other needs intervened.

When we began this project, we had not expected this. It would, rather, be more appropriate to say that we had ‘hoped’ not to encounter this. IIT Kanpur, as was also emphasized in all the interviews, is the premier engineering institute of the nation. The work-force of the institute, the students and the faculty, are hailed as the best minds in the country. In such a scenario, it pained us to see that the social dogmas that breed outside the campus, also propagate inside it. Women are still the ones who are expected to make the compromises. All men and women agreed on that, women matter-of-factly, men, patronizingly. One of the ideas that is propagated by liberal feminism is of equal opportunities and education. The belief is that once everyone is educated, the uncalled-for social differences would be eliminated. Issues regarding gender conflicts would be solved more rationally as education helps us understand that every individual is equally important.

The way the interviews went, they seemed not to subscribe to this ideology. Although people here are very educated, the discriminating factors that exist elsewhere in society, also exist here. So, does education actually help us bring about a change? The discussion veered to a point where, while arguing in favor of education, we came up with an argument saying that education at least helps us know that differentiating on the basis of gender is wrong. An illiterate person would not even know that it is wrong, so it does help us bring about awareness. At the same time, a counter-argument struck us, which we felt was extremely telling. If education helps us to know that this is wrong, then to practice it even after knowing this is a bigger mistake than that of the same illiterate person who doesn’t even know that he is committing a mistake.

The actions of women are referred to by their male counterparts as ‘sacrifice’, which serves a two-fold purpose. One, it supposedly gives the women a noble persona, entrusts them with a halo of courage and fortitude, and makes them enduring. Two, it relieves the spouse of any responsibility altogether, giving that element of choice by the use of the particular word, ‘sacrifice’. One wonders how much choice is actually there in that decision. How long will the façade of equality hold if one were to really exercise that choice. Also, the positive reaction of the society that goes with such ‘sacrifice’, in a way, puts pressure on women to conform to this idea. One wonders then, that is it, to that extent, a deliberate construct to make women feel that they too are important? One does wonder.

The concept of woman making the compromise also brought to fore, the idea of internalization of gender roles. We observed that almost all males, working or non-working, spoke predominantly of their work. Anything related to personal life was a fleeting comment rather than a discussion as in the case of professional issues. At the same time, women, even though employed, working and economically-independent they might have been, still focused a lot on domestic issues and how they struck a balance between their professional and personal lives. Do men relate more to public life and their work than women, who even when working, have to bear the responsibility of the home and hence, relate to it? Also, the interviews taken at home were generally much longer than the ones taken in office. It is said that, stereotypically, women tend to speak more, that is to say that it is a feminine trait. So again, to that extent, are workplaces also gendered? At home, the feminine traits would me more dominant while in the office, one tends to be more objective in one’s answers.

One also wonders why a question regarding faculty spouses invariably elicited responses regarding faculty wives. Although the male-female ratio in the faculty is extremely skewed (as is the case in the student community), female faculty members do exist, so why that brushing off of that small number, whether consciously or unconsciously? This also leads us to another issue, of couples living separately and working at different places. Though we do not have statistical proof to substantiate our claim here, but while we were looking for prospective interviewees, it was our perception that there is a relatively large percentage of female faculty members whose husbands work elsewhere. The number of male faculty members in a similar situation, are paltry in comparison, which again brings us to the question of sacrifice. Do husbands refuse to move in with their wives while the reverse is commonplace? If yes, does this have to do more with ego hassles, or societal implications of being termed dependent on your wife, irrespective of the truth?

The skewed male faculty to female faculty ratio would imply a corresponding skewed ratio of female spouses to male spouses on campus, assuming that most of the faculty members are married. It has already been established that faculty spouses are not satisfied with the kind of professional lives that they get to lead over here. Combining the two leaves us with a lot of professionally dissatisfied women on campus. Where does that lead us? Do we still take an unblemished pride in being, or having been, a part of this institute? Aren’t there dark corners waiting to be looked into which might diminish the invincible glory that the institute basks in?Another much talked about issue, which was evident from the interviews, is the crisis regarding insufficient faculty members in various departments. Of late, there has been a lot of talk about the lack of a proper infrastructure to handle the increased inflow of students every year, and one of the major concerns has been lack of faculty. In the wake of this scenario, the solution seemed rather obvious to us. When we have repeated mention of highly qualified but disgruntled faculty spouses roaming around on campus, why not dig into that talent pool and commence a symbiotic relationship that lets the two feed on each other? That would also, probably, eliminate the need for spouses to live separately and work in two different places. By overlooking this possibility, aren’t we losing out on certain good prospective faculty members? Also, with both spouses living and working together, isn’t it probable that the efficiency and productivity of both will increase accordingly?

Though we began with a lot of enthusiasm, we have ended up with a lot of questions that we did not foresee. It is not as happy an ending as we would have liked it to be, but we are still hopeful. IIT Kanpur, traditionally, has been a pioneer in taking radical decisions. For instance, as far as our limited knowledge goes, it is the only institute in India that allows the entry of boys in the girls’ hostel and vice-versa without any restrictions. This has to be one of the most radical gender related decisions that the institute has taken. We feel that if there is one tradition that it needs to keep up, it is this, to come up with changes where it matters the most.

posted by Swetank Gupta @ 8:52 am