We are engendered

The following was written in August 2014

Yesterday someone asked me, “how do you ensure that a place/subject like carpentry, sculpture does not get a tag of being a male zone?”.  On same  lines another teacher had asked me, "what is the point in teaching embroidery to boys?” . To the first question I said "since I am a woman I do it by just being there in that space.” To the second question I gave a long winding answer about finer motor skills, visualization, geometric progression, computers, life skills etc. None of which would have convinced the person who was rooted in gender bias.

            Often our biases stick out their heads when we least expect it. I lock the doors and windows, of my house, more carefully when my husband is travelling assuming that I am safer when he is around (and to those who don’t know my husband...well let's say he is no Schwarzneger). When we think about gender biases we immediately think about gender equality. These are two opposites, which pose the same problem, of not being able to celebrate the differences without specifying them. We associate carpentry with muscles and needlework with delicacy. Both are assumptions and rarely endorsed by the craftsmen themselves. To add to it we assume women are not capable of the former and men of the latter. Resulting in fascination or ridicule over our assumptions being challenged. (Wow! a woman who works in wood! that is so amazing!...Oh he likes needlework? Is it? how sweet (speaker showing various degrees of confused emotions) 

There are assumtions about motherhood, fatherhood, leadership, pedagogy, vanity and the works and all these reek of gender biases.

When my husband decided to be a stay at home dad most people asked him what he did for the whole day. To which he would answer, "My wife was a stay at home mom for 6 years, did you ask her that? I do what she used to do."

For me it has been a learning to be working in a (so called) man’s space and work towards what I bring to the space. Not by doing things differently but doing things comfortably and by accepting who I am.  Be it working with male carpenters who feel threatened by my presence and scoff at my designs or having male colleagues who inherently think I am in the wrong place. Embittered at times I often tried to be their equal or tried to be less assertive (sometimes pretending to be less smart), just to salvage the working equation and to keep the show on. And it has taken me a long while to realize that I too was operating from a gender-based understanding of the world. I took to this profession because I was curious and excited about it, and had little or no idea about the gender connotations. I never wanted to prove a point but unless I did, repeatedly, I could not operate. I don’t see myself as a woman. I see myself as a human. I see my son’s and husband’s vulnerability. The pressure of livelyhood lies squarely on a man’s shoulder even today. Men are almost never given a choice there, just the way a woman will never be forgiven for ignoring her maternal duties. And most often it will be men who will criticize men, and women who will criticize women…saas-bahu syndrome.

My thoughts at the end…did we mess with nature here? Or are we finally trying to restore the natural balance…or am I just repeating something told over and over again.