February 22, 2007
The New Indian Way
The Developer's Model of Development
By ASEEM SHRIVASTAVA
"An epitome of beauty, serenity and colonial charm"- From an advertisement for The Carlton, a luxury hotel created by The Rahejas in Kodaikanal, Tamil Nadu
Two competing notions of development are increasingly at war in the Indian economic landscape. One model is familiar to economists and policy-makers of an earlier era. We shall discuss that model later.
With changing times it would be folly to cling to outmoded concepts. One such concept, which wasted the nation's best resources during the days of the license-permit, Neta-Babu Raj, was the post-war notion of development. It sucked the human, capital and natural resources of the country for over four decades for which we have little to show.
There is thus urgent need to create and implement an entirely new model of development which answers Indian aspirations in a globalized world with far greater success. Here is what it looks like.
There will be world-class apartments in impressive high-rises touching the sky. Prospective residents will have choices ranging from compact studios to 6-bedroom dupleix flats designed for traditional Indian joint families. The apartments will be equipped with handsome, marble-topped bathrooms, studded with Jacuzzis and golden bidets imported from Europe. Every room will afford a commanding view of the golf course within whose precincts the skyscrapers will be located.
As you step out of the building you will find yourself before the 18th hole of the golf course nearest to you. If not in a golfing mood, you may choose to step out of the rear of your building: your eyes will alight upon an Olympic-sized swimming pool that has been built just for you. Look to your right and you will see Wimbledon-class tennis courts fully appointed with coaches and the latest equipment.
If you prefer independent accommodation we have for you a range of impressive townhouses and bungalows with sprawling lawns and their own private swimming pools. They come with all the facilities available for apartment-dwellers.
You will find your workplace within cycling distance of your residence. (100% safe biking tracks have been laid down on artificial turf to ensure your ease and comfort.) The building that houses your office is equipped with world-class business and communication facilities, including satellite links, global video conferencing facilities and broadband wireless internet connectivity.
Within your office building itself you will find a stress-busting massage parlor (offering a large variety of oriental massages), a mental health clinic (having world-class experienced professionals) and a beauty parlor (with some of the best herbalists in the world). There is also an in-house gym facility, a health club and an all-weather swimming pool.
For those of our customers connected to manufacturing, there are dozens of industrial parks within the city, properly zoned away from residential areas to minimize any of the negative effects of pollution (which itself is expected to be eliminated in the foreseeable future). These parks are fully provisioned with global quality infrastructure such as reliable, internally generated power facilities and ready and easy access to container and cargo terminals, making use of the latest international advances in efficient logistics.
SEZs (Special Economic Zones) are the latest innovation in Indian policy-making. They provide legal relief from archaic constitutional obstacles to rapid industrial growth: investors need no longer worry about paying taxes, minimum wages, health and pension benefits and environmental fines. We have several SEZs with irresistibly attractive terms of investment for both global and Indian players.
When you need to shop, you needn't drive far. We offer you tens of thousands of global brands not far from your doorstep. There are dozens of dazzling shopping malls excelling global standards, where you can find everything suited to your taste. There are supermarkets, garment, fashion and design stores, footwear stores, jewelry shops, electronics and IT bazaars, music shops, book stores, drug stores, hardware stores, home improvement outlets and even car dealerships. Now you need not lose time on your vacations to shop: even curios from all over the world have been gathered and assembled at our malls for your shopping pleasure.
When you have guests from out of town they can be accommodated at one of the many internationally networked luxury hotels. Our hotels offer all the facilities and amenities available to our residents, with attractive discounts available for our regular customers.
For your entertainment there are half a dozen multiplexes in the city, showing over three dozen films at a time. The film theatres are abutted by gaming parlors where young people can compete with their counterparts the world over.
Adjoining the hotels are amusement parks with childcare facilities on offer. Busy guests traveling with their children need not worry any more: we take full responsibility to entertain them on roller-coasters and waterslides. Our customers will find it assuring that we have won the highest international awards for excellence in providing hospitality to our guests.
We also have some of the most interesting theme parks in the world. There are stimulating interactive facilities to enable visitors to learn Hindu mythology and religion by signing up at the Panchatantra Park. You can even don the armour of a Pandava warrior at our Mahabharata Theme Park.
The city boasts of a number of helipads from where chartered flights can take you to the nearest international airports enabling smooth connections. Arrangements can also be made for chartering jets of all sizes from the nearest airports. Our travel agents will look after all your travel needs, both for business and pleasure, offering you some astounding discounts on vacations at virtually every beach or mountain resort anywhere in the world.
For your children we have some of the best schools in the world, offering the International Baccalaureate diploma in three different languages. Our teachers are trained in London and Geneva and are required to know at least three globally recognized languages well. They are also required to have spent at least half their working lives abroad.
Given the scrupulously clean and hygienic environment we maintain within the city sicknesses and poor health are rare. But should you ever feel the need there are world-class hospital facilities managed by the world's leading healthcare providers. You will be in the care of internationally reputed doctors and nurses.
Last, not least, every building and facility within the development is guarded by world-class surveillance equipment and security forces trained especially for you. You need never worry again for your safety once you entrust your security to us. Residents and visitors will especially appreciate the finesse with which our security personnel do their daily job without making themselves even remotely obtrusive or even visible.
Is it all only a fantasy?
The above is hardly a fantastic caricature of the promises made by India's leading builders and developers today. Indeed, one may observe that in some cases the promises are close to being met at the appropriate price.
Consider just a few promotional advertisements from some of India's leading builders and developers. Rahejas have already been quoted above. Unitech, whose profits this year are 3000% higher than last year, offers us "Shoppertainment for Indians." "Dreams are for achieving", they say, not merely to be savoured as fantasies. Ansals, with an international endorsement (Norsk Akkredit Ering EMS 006), offer a "futuristic SEZ in Greater Noida" which will become the "greentech IT hub" and "will usher in the new age of an IT-led economy". Parsvnath Parivar (with an ISO 9001/14001 certification) wish to invite us to join their family in order to enable them to create an "ever-enlarging footprint" across the length and breadth of the country. Any perceived irony is not intended.
It is evidently the case that India is "poised" to become a "developed" superpower at the cutting edge of the global economy. Those of us who are skeptical of the promises and the developments are either naysayers, doomsdayers, wet blankets or simply ignoramuses.
Unanswered questions
But some thorny issues remain. What about the people laboring to create and maintain these lavish establishments? What is their share of the promised prosperity? And what of those who the "developments" have displaced without rehabilitation? And what sorts of inputs of energy, water and resources are involved in the implementation of this world-class model of development? Where are the air and water-borne effluents from the establishments going to be discharged? Finally, hardly inconsequentially, what are the implications of these developments for that neglected and forgotten sector of the Indian economy, agriculture, on which two-thirds of our people anywhere from 700 to 750 million are directly dependent? Will the gathering crisis in agriculture endanger food security and supply in times to come, reducing to naught the gains made in the direction of self-sufficiency in food, canceling one of India's great achievements since gaining independence from the British in 1947, and possibly reintroducing the era of famines in India?
Is there any reckoning of these questions in the meetings and discussions carried out in the boardrooms of our policy-making elites? One wonders.
Trickle-down or vacuum up?
The questions raised above can be answered optimistically only with some heroism. The only assumption under which the model of development outlined above can be of any tangible benefit to the teeming millions of impoverished Indians is that the growth induced by large investments in the real estate sector of the economy will bring benefits to the lower classes in the form of new opportunities of employment both directly and secondarily, through spin-offs. This is the familiar refrain of pious promises of eventual trickle-down, which have yet to materialize anywhere in the world.
The narrow base of economic growth in India focussed thus far in the IT-BPO sectors of the service economy has meant that trickle-down theories of the spread of prosperity have remained confined to the sphere of illusions. The persistence of widespread hunger, malnutrition, poverty and unemployment reminds one of the economist-diplomat John Kenneth Galbraith's acerbic observation that faith in trickle-down is a bit like feeding race horses superior oats so that starving sparrows can forage in their dung.
In fact, far from the benefits of growth trickling down to the downtrodden, the policies adopted since the mid-1980s and early 1990s have led to big losses of rural economies and livelihoods that are not reckoned on the negative side of the ledger (where they belong) in the growth calculations of government statisticians. Besides, the poor throughout the country are being rapidly dispossessed of the only real asset in a primarily agrarian economy: land.
What happened to the old idea of development?
One thing is clear. The paradigm of development that is in place bears a far closer resemblance to the developer's model of development, as outlined above, than to the developmental visions of the first generation of planners and economists under Nehru. It ignores the repeated recommendations of seasoned thinkers like Amartya Sen (who has warned that even a 100 Cyberabads and IT Parks will make no dent in long-standing challenges of reducing malnutrition, starvation and poverty). Needless to add, the de facto "developmental" vision of our policy-makers does arrogant violence to Gandhi's vision of village republics.
It appears that somewhere during the past decade the meaning of the term "development" has undergone a decisive mutation in the heads of our policy-making elite.
Is economic growth the same as development?
Every student of Development Economics learns on the first few pages of her textbook that economic growth does not translate directly into economic development. The two notions are in fact quite distinct. Though, typically, the two are seen to go together, up to a not insignificant degree development is possible without growth as growth is possible without development. Sri Lanka, for instance, while scarcely growing at all, raised its average life expectancy a crucial indicator of well-being by a dozen years during the first 7 years of its independence from Britain. Saudi Arabia, despite growing rapidly after the OPEC-led oil boom of the 1970s has failed to bring about a transformation in the lives of the bulk of its citizens. To see whether growth will lead to development, one has to scrutinize closely the content and pattern of growth. On this, more will be said presently.
The point is that aggregate figures like per capita income can be seen to rise rapidly with economic growth, but the inequalities of wealth and income might be such as to mask entirely the poor material condition of most people's lives.
Economic growth in India in the last decade or so has been the experience of a minority, reflecting huge and growing corporate remuneration and the bloated salaries of skilled and English-speaking urban professionals belonging to upper and middle classes. Growth in the organized sector (including both private and public) has been largely jobless. In many cases, like at the manufacturing plants of Tata and Bajaj in the Mumbai-Pune belt, production has shot up dramatically during the last decade while, in fact, cutting back significantly on the employment of workers. Jobless growth, thanks to the path of labor-saving technology from the West, is the norm.
Development, as conceived by economists, planners, policy-makers and political leaders after decolonization in the middle of the last century, was about the socio-economic and political transformation of the lives of hundreds of millions of ordinary people. It was much more than just raising the real per capita income of the developing country. Importantly, it had nothing to with the fairy-tale dreams of builders and developers. For that matter, the Indian constitution does not even make a commitment to economic growth!
In addition to real per capita income (which in any case glosses over glaring and widening inequalities), by 1990 the pre-eminent international institution concerned with development issues, the World Bank, had learnt to include at least two other features in what began to be called "human development": average life expectancy as an indicator of health and the literacy rate as an indicator of education. When one observes trends in India's ranking among countries with respect to HDI, one sees that it has yet to fall below the 120s (China hovers between 70th and 75th). A per capita income of $2 a day at market exchange rates (China is $6-7 and the US is $100) is unbecoming of any country, let alone a purported or aspiring superpower.
Development with dignity?
How much dignity remains for those who are thrown off their farmlands in order to make way for the growth and progress of the nation in the form of a real-estate boom, the ultimate aim of property developments? And how much for those, sometimes the same people, who live "on the other side of the wall", so to speak, from the developments, and have to make do with open sewers, lack of drinking water, poor hutments, lack of hospitals and schools?
As far back as in 1972, soon after Indira Gandhi launched her idea of Garibi Hatao, the economist C.T.Kurien had written thus in an article entitled "Strategy for Development": "The development process in India has not yet become a mass movement. The development process cannot become effective until it becomes a movement" (Seminar, January 1972). It went on to say: "If development is for the people it has to be by the people also. Herein lies the connection between development and mass movement." The main policy recommendation of that piece was a public works programme by a district-level Land Army of those who were looking for work in the countryside, a proposal not dissimilar to the NREGS launched belatedly last year, so far with dubious success.
Amit Bhaduri's recent book Development with Dignity has argued forcefully the case for full employment in India. Here are his main observations:
1) "Our unforgivable failure has been the persistence of mass poverty and destitution. It is a matter of utter shame that nearly six decades after Independence, we have anywhere between one-third and one-fourth of our people desperately poor and denied the minimum conditions for human existence - the largest number of illiterates, millions of children crippled or blinded due to malnourishment."
2) India's continuing reliance on English has sustained a linguistic divide and inequality of opportunities between those who speak and those who do not speak English.
3) Agriculture is so overcrowded and devoid of earning opportunities, thanks to destructive trade and other agricultural policies of the governments after 1991, that in poor states like Bihar and MP, even selling peanuts on the streets brings more income. Disguised unemployment is extremely high.
4) "India's immense diversity creates a bewildering variety of identities, and politicians try to manipulate them to their advantage in the game for gathering votes at any cost."
5) "India has given its citizens political rights, but not economic rights to a decent livelihood, with or without economic liberalisation."
6) "Narrow minded policies focussing on 'cost' reduction fail to see that cost is a concept defined in a particular social context of contending economic interests.""The worker might think of profit as the 'cost' he has to bear for being employed, just as the employer thinks of wage as the 'cost' of employing the worker!"
Thus, Bhaduri proposes that "the developmental process that we must strive for is not simply a higher growth rate; nor should it mean simply an elaborate bureaucratic mechanism for income transfer to improve the distribution of income in favour of the poor. It has to be viewed from a different perspective altogether in which growth and distribution are integrated into the very same process, while breaking systematically the social barriers of discrimination and prejudices based on gender, caste, language, religion or ethnicity. This is what Development with Dignity must mean for us in India" (emphasis added). The author, one of India's well-known economists, adds with authority: "This is not a utopia. It is the only reasonable economics that this country can pursue with the support of the majority of its citizens who are poor to varying degrees."
So, importantly, Bhaduri proposes that redistribution of income and wealth and reduction of poverty and inequality happen through the growth process itself, not something that happens once growth has been achieved (by which time it is usually too late, since each growth strategy has a distributional strategy implicitly built into it).
For illustration, Bhaduri argues:
"Nowadays in big cities, and even in small towns, bottled drinking water is available at a price, which at most only the top 10 per cent of the income earners can afford. And yet, while the market naturally has no compulsion to make a basic good like safe drinking water available to the poor, it might produce more of bottled water and this could step up our statistic of the rate of growth!"
In an primarily market-driven economy the only reliable way of bringing most people to an acceptable standard of living is by creating employment opportunities which will put purchasing power into the hands of the hitherto poor, thereby altering in their favour (as also of aggregate growth data), the direction of market signals which determine what will be produced and in what quantities.
For instance, by putting the rural landless to work on infrastructure projects like road-building or environmental projects like watershed management, a demand for basic food, clothing and shelter will be created. The market mechanism will take over after that and supply the goods in the required amounts. This will tackle several challenges of the creation of infrastructure, the conservation/regeneration of the environment, the alleviation of poverty, the creation of employment, and the growth of the overall economy at one stroke. The same strategy could be applied equally well to infrastructure and environmental projects like watershed management or soil conservation to generate mass employment and income.
For a public spending of less than 4% of our GDP the families of some 40 million people (totalling about 200 million) could be lifted out of poverty. Taxation, public borrowing, or even printing the required currency are all viable options for financing such schemes if the economic activity undertaken is productive and generates income and demand in the economy.
Bhaduri is not unmindful of the staggering diversity of this country. So he wants such schemes to be administered not centrally by the state or central government but by local Panchayati Raj institutions.
Thus, like Kurien and many others, Bhaduri advocates a two-pronged economic strategy for a country like India. The rich and middle classes can hope to gain from the booms generated by a globalized market economy.
However, what's good for the goose is sometimes poison to the gander: countless millions can only expect disruption of their livelihoods and ways of life on account of the powerful interests operating in the country (and its countryside). For such people running into several hundred millions an altogether different strategy of development is called for. Bhaduri advocates an employment strategy much along the lines advocated by Kurien and already enacted in the NREGS regulation, though, as already mentioned, the attempt has been feeble and half-hearted.
In sum, recognizing the false promises of trickle-down Economics, Bhaduri advocates a strategy of "employment first, with growth as outcome" and not "growth first, and full employment later."
Needless to say the expenditures on health and education, long advocated by economists like Amartya Sen, are equally urgent if underprivileged India is to be lifted out of underdevelopment.
None of this is pie-in-the-sky daydreaming. On the contrary, to change the content and pattern of economic growth in the country is an imperative to sustain its level. When one considers, to take just one among many similar instances (the potential contribution made to effective aggregate demand by the poor being another), the shortage of skills being reported from all corners of Indian industry today, it becomes clear that in the future there will be no growth without development in the true sense of the word.
Development according to developers must be restrained, while the old idea of development must be awakened from its slumber in the minds of the policy-making elite. A failure to achieve this is likely to prove economically costly, quite apart from generating a political derailment of the growth process, with worse outcomes to follow in the shape of rising social tensions, political violence and crime.
Aseem Shrivastava is a trained economist and an independent writer. He can be reached at aseem62@yahoo.com.
Monday, March 26, 2007
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Gender bias is an unconscious reality in our lives
Introduction to the world
I find it funny to reflect on the fact that earlier I used to think that the world’s population is equally divided between males and females. No indepth reflection, just a simple application of the probability theory that one reads in schools and colleges. Now I know it is not as simple as that although I wish it would be. In India there are 921 females for 1000 boys, statistics which at first glance might present a fair enough picture but listen to the stories of female infanticide (in rich and poor areas alike), stories of torture for dowry, the restrictions on women and the numbers reflect a greater injustice, but still unable to convey a comprehensive reality of what happened to ‘herstory’ in ‘history’.
What are my first thoughts when it comes to gender? It is the problems of eve teasing and the subjugation of women’s freedom to the whims of the self appointed moral policemen of the Indian political scenario. Well, below is an account of how the gender inequality plays out in each and every dimension of Indian society, below is my story of learning and reflection.
Pink for a girl, Blue for a boy
When was the first time you realized that you are a boy or a girl? As tiny tots do you think we had an ‘Aha’ moment where we realized what our sex is? Do you see the role of those around you or the environment having a hand in your knowledge, and did this realization come in a positive manner? Do a survey in your group and see what various boys or girls have to say to this, also ask the people to reflect on their initial feelings during the realization. How do the feelings of boys compare to that of girls?
One of the first ways that children are ‘engendered’ by their family is in the games that are given to the child. A typical examples that guns are given to boys and dolls to girls. Now as a child who is extremely young and is receiving her or his first toy, do you think it would matter to the child whether it is a gun or a doll. Do you see the child crying and saying in baby language ‘I am a boy, I don’t want a doll, give me a gun, waaaaaah’.
Games help children develop attitude and skills and games is the initial manner in which we help reinforce or create gender stereotypes in children. So it is any wonder why boys love violence (and we all know the wonderful things that are a result of aggression and war) and want blood and gore in their video games and movies and girls become more nurturing and caring.
When it comes to games, alongwith parents the peers of a child restricts him or her freedom, e.g. friends would ridicule a boy to play cricket instead of playing making home with a girls, or a girl would not be allowed to play cricket by her boy friends. Next time when you become a parent, be unbiased and create an empowering environment for your child. Give your child trucks and dolls, encourage the child to play all sorts of games, it will only result in an all round holistic development in your child.
Boys don’t cry
One of the strongest manifestations of identities and stereotypes occurs in our demented social context of gender. I start with one of the extremely prevalent yet still a subtle dimension, that being in the realm of feelings. Where even feelings have a gender specific attribute, isn’t it, ask people to describe females in general and wouldn’t you often hear the word ‘emotional’. In our world even feelings are categorized according to gender for e.g. anger is a masculine trait and fear a feminine one. It is a stereotype enforced in movies and media when they show the strong heroes protecting their weak dainty heroines. This story will talk about media and gender later, but for those who think that I have started with a very weak case and am just being hypercritical or feminist, all I ask is a little patience. Just read through the entire article and then see whether what I have said is of any relevance.
So coming back to the realm of feelings, when it comes to typecasting a certain emotion as feminine or masculine, what is the standard of reference in the first place? When we say women are over emotional, isn’t the standard of reference the reaction of a man. Couldn’t it be said that women are normally emotional and it is men who are cold and lack emotion, I found this an interesting question to ask myself. So what is the typical male and female behaviour then, well are they there? Men can be emotional, and women can be aggressive. Think about it and I am sure a face will come to your mind who reflects the above reality.
Young men = Young women?
Puberty is the coming of age for a young person. But it means different things for boys and girls. In certain societies boys are circumcised and it usually signified as a period of celebration. But when a girl has periods, it is usually looked through the lens of shame and the society shuns as bad or protects. Why does society feel such a need, is it because it has been enforced upon women that she would be the bearer the honour of the family and the community. This attitude only seems to oppress women because a) it places restrictions on her mobility e.g. she cannot go out in the evening because she has to be protected b) she is raped by men who want to dishonour her community. Thus it is her honour that stifles and suppresses her. Thus the relationship between a woman and sex becomes linked to honour rather than pleasure or an act of love.
The protection of their honour might lead a family to consider their social status even more important than their own flesh and blood. Families in India and UK are indulging in large number of honour killings, whereby they kill their own daughter because her path of love takes her away from her family’s path of honour. This is something that I have yet to understand, how can a family regard the view and opinion of society (who are they in the first place, neighbours and community members?) to be so much more important than the freedom and happiness of their child. What is the power of this beast which compels a father, a brother, a mother to burn the person who they have nurtured and cared for throughout her life? And imagine what would be the person going through in her mind as she looks at her family members one last time.
It is the same honour which leads a family in rural India to believe that a child is ready to marry by the time she is 14-15 years. She has attained puberty, and thus her family is concerned, why? Because the girl can get pregnant, either out of choice or out of violence. So her family decides to absolve themselves of the responsibility and get the girl married. And for me till recently I looked at child marriage just through the lens of a law, an illegal act. But it is so much more than that, it’s the absence of adolescence in a young child, she grows from a child to a woman without passing the stage of adolescence. There is absolute no concept of tweens, teens, adolescence in rural communities. Imagine us in Class 8, remember our daily lives, our hobbies and interests and now imagine that you have a spouse and you are giving birth to children. NO, forget being illegal, it is inhuman. Oh! why did society arrive at such a position?
Various cruel practices are enforced upon young girls all over the world. In many communities around the world, the practice of female genital mutilation or circumcision still exists. Young girls between the ages of 13-14 years have their clitoris removed either by a mid wife or a doctor. In Egypt and other countries of Africa, the clitoris is removed through three dreadful manners a) it is cut off by a sharp tool b) in Bedouin tribes, the girl’s legs are bent and her heel is made to grind violently against the clitoris till it becomes completely damaged c) the most intense form, the clitoris of a girl is stitched up leaving only a tiny partition for the girl to urinate or deliver a baby. And all this because the clitoris is a bundle of sensitive nerves that sends extremely strong sexual signals to the body. This is another ghastly example of how a girl’s sexuality has been made to be linked with shame by the society. So what happens in a marriage then, the act of intimacy and love becomes just a painful call for the duty to satisfy the needs of her husband as a ‘good’ woman should do. We need to question who makes such laws, would God ever wish this? If it is written in Holy Scriptures then just go back into history to identify the sex of the person whose hand wrote the scriptures.
Holy be thy name
The next dimension really gets under my skin. Females are not allowed to enter temples when they are menstruating. Strange, if god created the female body and its inherent functions, then the period of menstruation is also creation of God and thus a phenomenon of celebration, definitely not a reason to bar women from entering temples. Why is the period of menstruation conceived to be something shameful? It is this blood that is signified as shameful, which nourishes the child when a woman is pregnant. An act which is described as a miracle in several societies and one of the primary reasons for which women are revered. A grand irony isn’t it. In Nepal, an adolescent girl is worshipped as a goddess and is given lavish treatment, but once she attains puberty, she becomes impure and then is cast away in a life full of isolation. You only have to see pictures of the drastic changes in her environment before you can even begin to imagine what kind of impact the change will have on a young mind.
SEX SELLS
The Media is so important in the context of gender stereotypes. It is powerful because of its outreach i.e. it reaches so many houses and so many people and that too consistently over a period of time. Thus they have an enormous power to guide and influence the way people think and behave at all levels.
In various advertisements you'll notice that women are much more likely than men to serve a decorative function. Women recline in seductive clothing, caressing a liquor bottle, or they drape themselves coyly on the nearest male. Now this is dangerous as one of the most problematic aspects of the gender is the view of women as sex objects. And this creates so many problems related to crimes against women such as eve teasing, molestation, violence.
But women are underrepresented in the Media. Music videos feature roughly twice as many males as females (Sommers-Flanagan, Sommers-Flanagan, & Davis, 1993). Women are not seen much, but they are heard even less. For example, the next time you see a television advertisement, notice whose voice of authority is extolling the product's virtues.
There is a predominant male authority in media. "Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth." - Simone de Beauvoir
The media’s voice of authority is most often that of a middle-aged, professional male. These men dominate the opinion-shaping forums of talk radio, newspaper journalism, and television news and commentary, and male voices are those most commonly heard in television and radio commercials.
And now that in today’s world young people are so exposed to media, it is not a surprise that young people emulate habits and behaviour that are linked to older people such as dressing provocatively and engaging in sexual behaviour. Thus young people are engaging in mature behaviour without cultivating the responsibility to think through their decisions. Eg young girls wearing thongs, engaging in sexual activity at a much young age e.g. The American movie Thirteen depicts real life stories of the risky behaviour that 13-14 year olds indulge in, young girls of the same age group shared in an Oprah Winfrey show that they believed it ok to perform oral sex on boys at parties and in relationships. And you can’t blame young people also, because the influence of media is so strong and scientific that definitely young, fresh, uncultivated would get influenced. So both in India and USA, the period of adolescence is becoming non-existential by tangible (parents) and intangible (media) influences.
But the need for the media to continue in this line needs to be analysed. What media is selling is titillation or eyeball capturing images. And with titillation, the audience does not need clever, intricate, culture-based scripts or convincing acting. This help in selling volumes of a product or gathering attention of the viewer. And this makes business sense because males have so much purchasing power. If the purchasing power was in the hands of women, it would not have made any business sense to sell images. Thus it is all the more important that we create financial empowerment for women because they would not support such representation in the media and it would eventually result in the lowering of crimes against women.
So gender biases are reinforced by media. But why should they not be? The role of the advertising media is not to create social education or gender equality. In their ad they want to position their product in an environment that reflects society. And the creative team media designs the ad on the behalf of a client, who is focused on getting eyeballs and profits. So we cannot blame the media alone, it is also their client, the company and the people who are in the charge of the product and the company. For example in the Fair and Lovely ads, we get carried away by the design of the ad and instigate the advertising agency, forgetting the company and the team that created the product in the first place. There is great need to educate young people about the media and provide them with the frameworks to be educated consumers of the media. We should also tell young people that when they get into the profession of media advertising or a product based company, they should not perpetuate such stereotyping.
And when in the corporate industry you have many more men and women, such stereotypes will only continue. It is because the men in the company conceiving the product and positioning will have the conventional stereotypical attitudes and the male copywriters in the advertising agencies will create ads that sends stereotypical messages.
Yes, in the current scenario more and more women are entering the industry but this phenomenon has yet to trickle into the management team which takes the decisions for the product design and steers the marketing strategy. As long as women do not enter into the management board of the company, the effect of more women getting into the industry will not be 100% effective.
So which are the industries that benefit from gender stereotypes? They are primarily the diet and cosmetic industries. Researchers report that women’s magazines have ten and one-half times more ads and articles promoting weight loss than men’s magazines do, and over three-quarters of the covers of women’s magazines include at least one message about how to change a woman’s bodily appearance—by diet, exercise or cosmetic surgery. By presenting an ideal body that is difficult to achieve and maintain, the cosmetic and diet product industries are assured of sustained demand resulting in growth and profits. Studies indicate that women who are insecure about their bodies are more likely to buy beauty products, new clothes, and diet aids.
The incessant projection of such unhealthy images has severe impact on today’s youth. More and more individuals are concerned about their body image i.e. an individual’s concerns and perceptions about their own physical appearance. With the media e.g. (music videos, magazines, movies and TV) continuously pumping images of the bodies of unhealthy thin girls it is creating an unnatural aspiration for women across the world. It becomes difficult for females to achieve any kind of contentment or satisfaction with respect to their bodies. This negative perception seems to happen more with girl than boys. This desire to be thin despite being healthy starts in girls at a very young age. Girls at the age of nine are going on diets to maintain a thin look.
The American research group Anorexia Nervosa & Related Eating Disorders, Inc. says that one out of every four college-aged women uses unhealthy methods of weight control—including fasting, skipping meals, excessive exercise, laxative abuse, and self-induced vomiting. And the Canadian Fitness and Lifestyle Research Institute warns that weight control measures are being taken by girls as young as nine (class 5). American statistics are similar. In 2003, Teen magazine reported that 35 per cent of girls 6 to 12 years old (class 3-class7) have been on at least one diet, and that 50 to 70 per cent of normal weight girls believe they are overweight.
And since this exposure happens in an adolescent mind, the mind is also not wise enough to critically analyze the signals that it is receiving. Magazines and advertisements are marketed to help women "better themselves" by providing information and products and women read these magazines with the hope that if they follow the advice given, they will be more acceptable and attractive. This depicts a certain lack of personal security and accurate information.
There are a few theories is that why women internalize the messages that are given in the society and are not able to reject them on a large scale. One is that humans by nature have a tendency to compare themselves with other human being and rely on their comparison for their high or low sense of self esteem. The industry capitalizes on this human trait and always sends images of bodies that have a perceived aspirational value so that women buy their products. The impact of such exposure leads to dissatisfaction with weight, unhealthy eating habits, over-exercising, surgery.
The second is that because such images are so prevalent and consistent in the media that the audience believes that the images are part of a reality, ie the normal state of a women’s body. Thus anything different from this ‘constructed reality’ becomes unhealthy in their minds.
But I also came across an interesting contradictory story of whether it makes business sense to pursue gender stereotypes. Advertisers believe that thin models sell products. When the Australian magazine New Woman recently included a picture of a heavy-set model on its cover, it received a truckload of letters from grateful readers praising the move. But its advertisers complained and the magazine returned to featuring bone-thin models. Advertising Age International concluded that the incident "made clear the influence wielded by advertisers who remain convinced that only thin models spur the sales of beauty products." Again I am sure that these advertisers surely belong to the diet and cosmetic companies. The media needs to sell an idea, and that is why they need to simulate the ‘real scenario’ i.e. society in their advertisements. On the other hand if a repressed society is exposed to positive images in the media, they become more mature and open. Thus society and media are so interdependent on each other.
I don’t know whether media can ever dictate the lifestyles or culture of a community or is it the privilege of a company possessing tremendous financial clout and power. Maybe both of them have a hand to play, the company being the thinker and the media being the executioner. Although media and corporate are a potent team, society have rejected their messages in the past, example popular opinion persuaded Pepsi to focus on health drinks. So it would be interesting to study the various examples in which society has rejected the popular lifestyle choices that have been projected by companies and media.
It starts from Home
I would like to conclude the article from where it started, from where all our lives start, i.e. our home. Gender stereotypes are introduced to a person as soon as they are born, whether it is the colour of their room or the toys given to them. Parents would focus on making their girl child look pretty and beautiful and are ok if their male child gets dirty. Thus when boys and girls grow up, they themselves reinforce the gender stereotypes i.e. girls are focusing more on their looks and dresses and boys grow up into roughhousing, playing outside, and getting dirty. A lot of the messages that are given to a child by his or her parent build gender specific identities in the child as he or she grows up. The media just revolves around the construct that we have created in our homes e.g. in a magazine targeted at teenage girls ie. Seventeen, an analysis of the articles demonstrated that only 7% of the contents concerned career planning, independence, and other self-development topics, in contrast, 46% of the contents concerned appearance
I find it funny to reflect on the fact that earlier I used to think that the world’s population is equally divided between males and females. No indepth reflection, just a simple application of the probability theory that one reads in schools and colleges. Now I know it is not as simple as that although I wish it would be. In India there are 921 females for 1000 boys, statistics which at first glance might present a fair enough picture but listen to the stories of female infanticide (in rich and poor areas alike), stories of torture for dowry, the restrictions on women and the numbers reflect a greater injustice, but still unable to convey a comprehensive reality of what happened to ‘herstory’ in ‘history’.
What are my first thoughts when it comes to gender? It is the problems of eve teasing and the subjugation of women’s freedom to the whims of the self appointed moral policemen of the Indian political scenario. Well, below is an account of how the gender inequality plays out in each and every dimension of Indian society, below is my story of learning and reflection.
Pink for a girl, Blue for a boy
When was the first time you realized that you are a boy or a girl? As tiny tots do you think we had an ‘Aha’ moment where we realized what our sex is? Do you see the role of those around you or the environment having a hand in your knowledge, and did this realization come in a positive manner? Do a survey in your group and see what various boys or girls have to say to this, also ask the people to reflect on their initial feelings during the realization. How do the feelings of boys compare to that of girls?
One of the first ways that children are ‘engendered’ by their family is in the games that are given to the child. A typical examples that guns are given to boys and dolls to girls. Now as a child who is extremely young and is receiving her or his first toy, do you think it would matter to the child whether it is a gun or a doll. Do you see the child crying and saying in baby language ‘I am a boy, I don’t want a doll, give me a gun, waaaaaah’.
Games help children develop attitude and skills and games is the initial manner in which we help reinforce or create gender stereotypes in children. So it is any wonder why boys love violence (and we all know the wonderful things that are a result of aggression and war) and want blood and gore in their video games and movies and girls become more nurturing and caring.
When it comes to games, alongwith parents the peers of a child restricts him or her freedom, e.g. friends would ridicule a boy to play cricket instead of playing making home with a girls, or a girl would not be allowed to play cricket by her boy friends. Next time when you become a parent, be unbiased and create an empowering environment for your child. Give your child trucks and dolls, encourage the child to play all sorts of games, it will only result in an all round holistic development in your child.
Boys don’t cry
One of the strongest manifestations of identities and stereotypes occurs in our demented social context of gender. I start with one of the extremely prevalent yet still a subtle dimension, that being in the realm of feelings. Where even feelings have a gender specific attribute, isn’t it, ask people to describe females in general and wouldn’t you often hear the word ‘emotional’. In our world even feelings are categorized according to gender for e.g. anger is a masculine trait and fear a feminine one. It is a stereotype enforced in movies and media when they show the strong heroes protecting their weak dainty heroines. This story will talk about media and gender later, but for those who think that I have started with a very weak case and am just being hypercritical or feminist, all I ask is a little patience. Just read through the entire article and then see whether what I have said is of any relevance.
So coming back to the realm of feelings, when it comes to typecasting a certain emotion as feminine or masculine, what is the standard of reference in the first place? When we say women are over emotional, isn’t the standard of reference the reaction of a man. Couldn’t it be said that women are normally emotional and it is men who are cold and lack emotion, I found this an interesting question to ask myself. So what is the typical male and female behaviour then, well are they there? Men can be emotional, and women can be aggressive. Think about it and I am sure a face will come to your mind who reflects the above reality.
Young men = Young women?
Puberty is the coming of age for a young person. But it means different things for boys and girls. In certain societies boys are circumcised and it usually signified as a period of celebration. But when a girl has periods, it is usually looked through the lens of shame and the society shuns as bad or protects. Why does society feel such a need, is it because it has been enforced upon women that she would be the bearer the honour of the family and the community. This attitude only seems to oppress women because a) it places restrictions on her mobility e.g. she cannot go out in the evening because she has to be protected b) she is raped by men who want to dishonour her community. Thus it is her honour that stifles and suppresses her. Thus the relationship between a woman and sex becomes linked to honour rather than pleasure or an act of love.
The protection of their honour might lead a family to consider their social status even more important than their own flesh and blood. Families in India and UK are indulging in large number of honour killings, whereby they kill their own daughter because her path of love takes her away from her family’s path of honour. This is something that I have yet to understand, how can a family regard the view and opinion of society (who are they in the first place, neighbours and community members?) to be so much more important than the freedom and happiness of their child. What is the power of this beast which compels a father, a brother, a mother to burn the person who they have nurtured and cared for throughout her life? And imagine what would be the person going through in her mind as she looks at her family members one last time.
It is the same honour which leads a family in rural India to believe that a child is ready to marry by the time she is 14-15 years. She has attained puberty, and thus her family is concerned, why? Because the girl can get pregnant, either out of choice or out of violence. So her family decides to absolve themselves of the responsibility and get the girl married. And for me till recently I looked at child marriage just through the lens of a law, an illegal act. But it is so much more than that, it’s the absence of adolescence in a young child, she grows from a child to a woman without passing the stage of adolescence. There is absolute no concept of tweens, teens, adolescence in rural communities. Imagine us in Class 8, remember our daily lives, our hobbies and interests and now imagine that you have a spouse and you are giving birth to children. NO, forget being illegal, it is inhuman. Oh! why did society arrive at such a position?
Various cruel practices are enforced upon young girls all over the world. In many communities around the world, the practice of female genital mutilation or circumcision still exists. Young girls between the ages of 13-14 years have their clitoris removed either by a mid wife or a doctor. In Egypt and other countries of Africa, the clitoris is removed through three dreadful manners a) it is cut off by a sharp tool b) in Bedouin tribes, the girl’s legs are bent and her heel is made to grind violently against the clitoris till it becomes completely damaged c) the most intense form, the clitoris of a girl is stitched up leaving only a tiny partition for the girl to urinate or deliver a baby. And all this because the clitoris is a bundle of sensitive nerves that sends extremely strong sexual signals to the body. This is another ghastly example of how a girl’s sexuality has been made to be linked with shame by the society. So what happens in a marriage then, the act of intimacy and love becomes just a painful call for the duty to satisfy the needs of her husband as a ‘good’ woman should do. We need to question who makes such laws, would God ever wish this? If it is written in Holy Scriptures then just go back into history to identify the sex of the person whose hand wrote the scriptures.
Holy be thy name
The next dimension really gets under my skin. Females are not allowed to enter temples when they are menstruating. Strange, if god created the female body and its inherent functions, then the period of menstruation is also creation of God and thus a phenomenon of celebration, definitely not a reason to bar women from entering temples. Why is the period of menstruation conceived to be something shameful? It is this blood that is signified as shameful, which nourishes the child when a woman is pregnant. An act which is described as a miracle in several societies and one of the primary reasons for which women are revered. A grand irony isn’t it. In Nepal, an adolescent girl is worshipped as a goddess and is given lavish treatment, but once she attains puberty, she becomes impure and then is cast away in a life full of isolation. You only have to see pictures of the drastic changes in her environment before you can even begin to imagine what kind of impact the change will have on a young mind.
SEX SELLS
The Media is so important in the context of gender stereotypes. It is powerful because of its outreach i.e. it reaches so many houses and so many people and that too consistently over a period of time. Thus they have an enormous power to guide and influence the way people think and behave at all levels.
In various advertisements you'll notice that women are much more likely than men to serve a decorative function. Women recline in seductive clothing, caressing a liquor bottle, or they drape themselves coyly on the nearest male. Now this is dangerous as one of the most problematic aspects of the gender is the view of women as sex objects. And this creates so many problems related to crimes against women such as eve teasing, molestation, violence.
But women are underrepresented in the Media. Music videos feature roughly twice as many males as females (Sommers-Flanagan, Sommers-Flanagan, & Davis, 1993). Women are not seen much, but they are heard even less. For example, the next time you see a television advertisement, notice whose voice of authority is extolling the product's virtues.
There is a predominant male authority in media. "Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth." - Simone de Beauvoir
The media’s voice of authority is most often that of a middle-aged, professional male. These men dominate the opinion-shaping forums of talk radio, newspaper journalism, and television news and commentary, and male voices are those most commonly heard in television and radio commercials.
And now that in today’s world young people are so exposed to media, it is not a surprise that young people emulate habits and behaviour that are linked to older people such as dressing provocatively and engaging in sexual behaviour. Thus young people are engaging in mature behaviour without cultivating the responsibility to think through their decisions. Eg young girls wearing thongs, engaging in sexual activity at a much young age e.g. The American movie Thirteen depicts real life stories of the risky behaviour that 13-14 year olds indulge in, young girls of the same age group shared in an Oprah Winfrey show that they believed it ok to perform oral sex on boys at parties and in relationships. And you can’t blame young people also, because the influence of media is so strong and scientific that definitely young, fresh, uncultivated would get influenced. So both in India and USA, the period of adolescence is becoming non-existential by tangible (parents) and intangible (media) influences.
But the need for the media to continue in this line needs to be analysed. What media is selling is titillation or eyeball capturing images. And with titillation, the audience does not need clever, intricate, culture-based scripts or convincing acting. This help in selling volumes of a product or gathering attention of the viewer. And this makes business sense because males have so much purchasing power. If the purchasing power was in the hands of women, it would not have made any business sense to sell images. Thus it is all the more important that we create financial empowerment for women because they would not support such representation in the media and it would eventually result in the lowering of crimes against women.
So gender biases are reinforced by media. But why should they not be? The role of the advertising media is not to create social education or gender equality. In their ad they want to position their product in an environment that reflects society. And the creative team media designs the ad on the behalf of a client, who is focused on getting eyeballs and profits. So we cannot blame the media alone, it is also their client, the company and the people who are in the charge of the product and the company. For example in the Fair and Lovely ads, we get carried away by the design of the ad and instigate the advertising agency, forgetting the company and the team that created the product in the first place. There is great need to educate young people about the media and provide them with the frameworks to be educated consumers of the media. We should also tell young people that when they get into the profession of media advertising or a product based company, they should not perpetuate such stereotyping.
And when in the corporate industry you have many more men and women, such stereotypes will only continue. It is because the men in the company conceiving the product and positioning will have the conventional stereotypical attitudes and the male copywriters in the advertising agencies will create ads that sends stereotypical messages.
Yes, in the current scenario more and more women are entering the industry but this phenomenon has yet to trickle into the management team which takes the decisions for the product design and steers the marketing strategy. As long as women do not enter into the management board of the company, the effect of more women getting into the industry will not be 100% effective.
So which are the industries that benefit from gender stereotypes? They are primarily the diet and cosmetic industries. Researchers report that women’s magazines have ten and one-half times more ads and articles promoting weight loss than men’s magazines do, and over three-quarters of the covers of women’s magazines include at least one message about how to change a woman’s bodily appearance—by diet, exercise or cosmetic surgery. By presenting an ideal body that is difficult to achieve and maintain, the cosmetic and diet product industries are assured of sustained demand resulting in growth and profits. Studies indicate that women who are insecure about their bodies are more likely to buy beauty products, new clothes, and diet aids.
The incessant projection of such unhealthy images has severe impact on today’s youth. More and more individuals are concerned about their body image i.e. an individual’s concerns and perceptions about their own physical appearance. With the media e.g. (music videos, magazines, movies and TV) continuously pumping images of the bodies of unhealthy thin girls it is creating an unnatural aspiration for women across the world. It becomes difficult for females to achieve any kind of contentment or satisfaction with respect to their bodies. This negative perception seems to happen more with girl than boys. This desire to be thin despite being healthy starts in girls at a very young age. Girls at the age of nine are going on diets to maintain a thin look.
The American research group Anorexia Nervosa & Related Eating Disorders, Inc. says that one out of every four college-aged women uses unhealthy methods of weight control—including fasting, skipping meals, excessive exercise, laxative abuse, and self-induced vomiting. And the Canadian Fitness and Lifestyle Research Institute warns that weight control measures are being taken by girls as young as nine (class 5). American statistics are similar. In 2003, Teen magazine reported that 35 per cent of girls 6 to 12 years old (class 3-class7) have been on at least one diet, and that 50 to 70 per cent of normal weight girls believe they are overweight.
And since this exposure happens in an adolescent mind, the mind is also not wise enough to critically analyze the signals that it is receiving. Magazines and advertisements are marketed to help women "better themselves" by providing information and products and women read these magazines with the hope that if they follow the advice given, they will be more acceptable and attractive. This depicts a certain lack of personal security and accurate information.
There are a few theories is that why women internalize the messages that are given in the society and are not able to reject them on a large scale. One is that humans by nature have a tendency to compare themselves with other human being and rely on their comparison for their high or low sense of self esteem. The industry capitalizes on this human trait and always sends images of bodies that have a perceived aspirational value so that women buy their products. The impact of such exposure leads to dissatisfaction with weight, unhealthy eating habits, over-exercising, surgery.
The second is that because such images are so prevalent and consistent in the media that the audience believes that the images are part of a reality, ie the normal state of a women’s body. Thus anything different from this ‘constructed reality’ becomes unhealthy in their minds.
But I also came across an interesting contradictory story of whether it makes business sense to pursue gender stereotypes. Advertisers believe that thin models sell products. When the Australian magazine New Woman recently included a picture of a heavy-set model on its cover, it received a truckload of letters from grateful readers praising the move. But its advertisers complained and the magazine returned to featuring bone-thin models. Advertising Age International concluded that the incident "made clear the influence wielded by advertisers who remain convinced that only thin models spur the sales of beauty products." Again I am sure that these advertisers surely belong to the diet and cosmetic companies. The media needs to sell an idea, and that is why they need to simulate the ‘real scenario’ i.e. society in their advertisements. On the other hand if a repressed society is exposed to positive images in the media, they become more mature and open. Thus society and media are so interdependent on each other.
I don’t know whether media can ever dictate the lifestyles or culture of a community or is it the privilege of a company possessing tremendous financial clout and power. Maybe both of them have a hand to play, the company being the thinker and the media being the executioner. Although media and corporate are a potent team, society have rejected their messages in the past, example popular opinion persuaded Pepsi to focus on health drinks. So it would be interesting to study the various examples in which society has rejected the popular lifestyle choices that have been projected by companies and media.
It starts from Home
I would like to conclude the article from where it started, from where all our lives start, i.e. our home. Gender stereotypes are introduced to a person as soon as they are born, whether it is the colour of their room or the toys given to them. Parents would focus on making their girl child look pretty and beautiful and are ok if their male child gets dirty. Thus when boys and girls grow up, they themselves reinforce the gender stereotypes i.e. girls are focusing more on their looks and dresses and boys grow up into roughhousing, playing outside, and getting dirty. A lot of the messages that are given to a child by his or her parent build gender specific identities in the child as he or she grows up. The media just revolves around the construct that we have created in our homes e.g. in a magazine targeted at teenage girls ie. Seventeen, an analysis of the articles demonstrated that only 7% of the contents concerned career planning, independence, and other self-development topics, in contrast, 46% of the contents concerned appearance
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