The Critical Issue. Give a good name

It’s a winter morning in Delhi and I’m at a large summit-type meeting on women in business. A large number of women, and some men, are gathered in a luxury hotel, to spend the day discussing the gendering of workplace, nuancing their understanding of diversity and inclusion, expanding their understanding of unconscious bias.

I’m impressed at this. This is the fourth or fifth such meeting I’ve been to. It’s clear that gender concerns are finding their way into the workspace and that has to be a good thing.

But there are interesting — and sometimesamusing — paradoxes. On the stage with me are three men and I have an odd sense of déjà vu, of being the token woman, except that I did not expect to be the token woman in a gathering of women.

But grey hair means you can laugh at these things sometimes, and this is one of those times. The men on stage turn out to be quite sensible, and reasonably sensitive. They have the grace to look embarrassed when I point out the irony of their presence on stage.

The proceedings begin. We hear from a CEO of a large corporation how they look at the presence of women in their company. The statistics are impressive: it’s clear that women have high productivity, that they work with care and precision.

We learn that companies are understanding that dealing with gender in the workplace does not merely mean setting up separate toilets or introducing flexi-time. A CEO of a large multinational tells us how, in his company, gloves, hard hats, overalls are now made in different sizes, women’s sizes too. They’ve found that ill-fitting gloves mean reduced productivity, and sometimes injuries, as they are more likely to tear.

The issue that emerges as the most important, though, is one that is being widely talked about and debated today: sexual harassment. “We have a zero-tolerance policy on this,” the CEO tells us, “our motto is ‘No Weinsteins, only Einsteins’.”

In my presentation, too, I focus a little on sexual harassment. Since it has become one of the most important of gender discourses in corporate workplaces, I think it may be appropriate to ask the audience if it is aware of the history of the sexual harassment law in India, if it has heard of the Vishakha guidelines (one hand goes up) or Bhanwari Devi (one hand again).

That evening, at another event, this time on child marriage, I meet Bhanwari Devi. She’s travelled from Rajasthan to this event because she too was a child bride. And it was while she was trying to stop child marriage in her area that her life changed, a change that was to touch the lives of thousands of women.

Bhanwari Devi is introduced to the audience as “the woman who gave us the sexual harassment law”. Indeed she is that woman. It was while trying to do her job — which was to implement the government’s law on child marriage — that Bhanwari Devi was raped by upper-caste Gujjar men as reprisal.

Unlike many women who do not know what to do in such instances, Bhanwari Devi did, because she worked with a women’s group. She filed a case, the courts ruled against her, but although justice has been elusive, her battle continues in a hundred other ways.

What Bhanwari Devi’s case did do, however, was to set feminist activists thinking. Bhanwari Devi was raped while she was doing her job as an ‘employee’ of the Women’s Development Programme, a large Central- and State-government initiative in Rajasthan.

The question that confronted women’s groups then was: what is the definition of work, and of the workplace? Bhanwari Devi’s workplace was not within the four walls of an office; she wasn’t a regular employee but occupied an ambivalent space where she was paid a regular wage, but was considered as some kind of a volunteer.

Activists realised that a workplace could be in the fields, offices, homes. And within these anyone could be vulnerable: freelance or contract workers, workers at off-sites, online workers and so many more.

And it was this thinking, and these discussions that eventually led to the filing of the Vishakha petition by four groups. As I sat next to Bhanwari Devi at the event on child marriage, I thought how lightly she wears this, and how much we women, and those men who care, owed her.

Bhanwari Devi isn’t the only woman who has given us major change. There are others: some lived to see the change, some died before that, but what they went through was a catalyst for major change in relation to women. I am thinking of Mathura the tribal woman, Rameeza Bee the Muslim woman, Bhanwari the dalit woman, Jyoti the urban woman, the women of the Bhotmange family in Khairlanji, and so many more.

Perhaps it’s time to salute them.

Urvashi Butalia is an editor, publisher and director of Zubaan

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