Paper No. : Women, Media & Films
Module :How Media Covers Working Women (high-paying vs. Low-paying)
Prof. Sumita Parmar
Allahabad University, Allahabad
Development Team
Principal Investigator
Paper Coordinator
Content Writer
Content Reviewer
Prof. Sisir Basu
Prof Chander Mahadev Amity University, Lucknow
Prof. Reicha Tanwar
Kurukshetra Univesity, Kurukshetra
Description of Module Description of Module Subject Name Women’s Studies
Paper Name Women, Media & Films Module
Name/Title
How the Media Covers Working Women (high-paying vs.
low-paying): Concept of working women in India;
contextualizing feminism in India; the plight of low-paid
How the Media Covers Working Women (high-paying vs. low paying)
(A) Personal Details
Role Name Affiliation
Principal Investigator
Prof. Sumita Parmar
Allahabad University, Allahabad
Paper Coordinator Prof. Sisir Basu
BHU, Varanasi Content
Writer/Author (CW)
Prof Chander Mahadev
Amity University, Lucknow
Content Reviewer (CR)
Prof. Sisir Basu
BHU, Varanasi Language Editor
(LE)
Dr. Sonal Parmar
Consultant Editor, New Delhi
working women; coverage across media domains;
communication revolution boon or bane; social factors, workforce perspective; Jessica Lal murder re-trial; women editors put things in perspective
Module Id Course – 10, Module - 14
Pre-requisites The reader is expected to know how the media covers working women, both high-paying and low-paying
Objectives To define & understand the social fabric that determines how the media across the globe portrays working women.
However, the stress is more on how Indian media covers working working women, ever since economic liberalisation during the 1990s.
Keywords Working women, evolving definition, perception issues, low- paid, high-paid, legal cases, media domains.
1.0 Introduction
The new millennium should have ushered in a paradigm shift in the way we perceive his-tory. Going by the technological advancements and the great strides society has made, the time was ripe to acknowledge the birth of her-story. But that was not to be. The oft- repeated cliché that behind every successful man is the hand of a woman, best describes media coverage of working women in India.
The statement posits the fact that women are destined to play the role of supporting actors and never that of the protagonists.
Sixty-eight years is not a long time in the life of an independent nation like India. Considered a prudish society steeped in British Victorian morality, there have been many social upheavals recorded in the growth of the democratic polity of this nascent nation. And while the media played a unique and positive role during the Independence struggle to foster the idea of India, the notion of the working woman as a productive and independent individual playing her part in nation-building has never been an easily accepted reality.
Since 1947, the largely state-controlled media tried to meet its developmental goals in a male-dominated environment. More
importantly, the media ignored women’s issues since the major threat to India’s existence was the burgeoning issue of the population
explosion and family planning became its one-point agenda. With a huge population to feed, employment generation became its national obsession and this meant getting the man of the house a job in order to keep the home fires burning. A job for its women-folk was an issue that remained on the backburner till the economic liberalisation
process was set in motion in the early 1990s. According to a senior Indian woman journalist, the comparison and contrast between high- paying and low-paying working women is a misnomer since even today the concept of the working woman is a hardly accepted norm. It is in this backdrop that we need to understand that the media holds a mirror to society and perception issues dominate Indian media
discourse on working women. We first need to contextualise as to when the idea of Indian feminism kicked in.
Contextualising Feminism & Working Women in India
Feminism refers to a series of social, political and religious movements aimed at defending and demanding equal economic, social and political rights for women. The right to work for equal wages, equal political rights and equal access to health and education was at the heart of these movements. Feminism in India started in the mid nineteenth century. People started to speak against the practice of Sati. It gained momentum during the fight for independence and post- independence, focusing on women being treated fairly and equally at their homes and at work. Feminism is seen as the struggle against all forms of patriarchal and sexiest aggression. It implies that women suffer from systematic social injustice because of their sex. Women in India negotiate their survival through many an oppressive structure of the family system including age, relationship to men through family of origin, ordinal status, marriage, procreation and patriarchal attributes.1
Modern Indian women, despite the feminist movements’ success, are still subjected to multiple issues of discrimination. When women will free themselves of the dependence; whether it is on husband, father, the community or a religious group and lead a normal life, then true feminism would materialize.
1 Samita Sen, Toward a Feminist Politics? The Indian Women’s Movement in Historical Perspective (Retrieved on 20.08.2015)
2Globally, India ranks low in human development. Amongst the emerging market economies, the female labour force participation in India is also low. It is said with greater labour force participation by women higher would be the economic growth. Yet, there exists a large gap in the labour force participation rates of women and men in India. When it comes to gender gap with respect to education, healthcare, political and economic issues is also high for Indians.
India ranks 113th of the 135 countries study on the gender gap Index undertaken by the World Economic Forum. Women comprise 24% of India’s workforce and the country ranks 111th in a list of 131 countries. More women are found in the private sector than in the government sector. Women are yet to become major contributors towards the national workforce.
Y
2.0 Low-paid Women’s Plight
2 International Monetary Fund, Women, Work, and the Economy: Macroeconomic Gains From Gender Equity (Retrieved on 20.08.2015)
With low-wage earning Indian women dominating the agrarian and unorganized sector, their coverage in the Indian media is also as marginal, if not as insensitive as it should not be. With feminists like Madhu Kishwar, Urvashi Butalia and Shabhana Azmi taking up cudgels on behalf of the dis-empowered and exploited women workforce in the seventies and the eighties, there has been some awakening across media domains though not as much as should be.
Dowry deaths which are rampant both in the urban and rural areas, are hardly covered with the sensitivity that is required. In the same vein, female foeticide and the Indian’s family’s obsession with the male child has also been addressed in fits and starts by the largely reactive and not proactive media. The end result is that it has lead to hugely skewed male-female ratio in states like Haryana and parts of Rajasthan. The third lurking issue of low-paid single women is the bane of honour killing, which is covertly accepted by a significant section of the media.
On the other hand, where feminism has lead to awareness amongst women about their conjugal, legal and work rights, women are yet to take up charge and demand their rights. The prevailing societal norms compel women to take less paying jobs, make fewer attempts to further their careers, and think more of family and personal sacrifice that would have to be made if they want to climb up the corporate ladder and maintain a job which lets them fulfill their personal roles more than their professional ones.
An analysis of the status of media coverage of working women in India reveals a not a very bright picture. Women are still engaged more in the informal than the formal sectors. Urban women’s participation is more recognized than those from the rural areas.
Companies and organizations are less receptive towards the needs of the women workforce than the men.
Some recent cases highlighted by the media
There are numerous cases that the media projected in the last decade including the one of auxiliary nurse and midwife Bhanwari Devi, in 2011, who was killed by a Rajasthan minister and his cohorts.
Some of the other well-known cases brought to light by the media were:
Uma Khurana
3In the year 2006, Uma Khurana, a mathematics teacher of the government Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya in central Delhi’s Daryaganj, was almost lynched by an angry mob after a sting
operation alleged she had blackmailed her students into prostitution.
The police, however, said they had not received any complaint against her. “There was no complaint about her running a prostitution racket and no cases are registered against her,” said a senior police officer.
Khurana does not have a spotless record. During her previous posting at the Government Senior Secondary School for Girls in Vivek Vihar Phase II, she was suspended on grounds of alleged misconduct. She was reinstated later and transferred to the school in Daryaganj.
Relations had soured between the teacher and the acting principal following allegations that Khurana used to help students cheat during exams. In turn, she complained that the vice-principal was involved in embezzlement of school funds.
Khurana was suspended in December 2006 on charges of misconduct, not checking answer sheets and allowing students to change their answer sheets. She was issued a chargesheet in February 2007.
Following an appeal to revoke her suspension, she was reinstated in April. A resident of Yojana Vihar in East Delhi, she lives with her husband and two children.
2.2 ShineyAhuja Assaults Maid
In a major development in early June 2009, Bollywood actor Shiney Ahuja who reportedly assaulted a maid, was arrested on June 15 after his domestic help accused him of raping her at his suburban Oshiwara residence.
Earlier, the medical reports of the actor had suggested that he was not under the influence of alcohol or drugs at the time of the incident. The reports of the actor also showed an abrasion on his right hand with no other injury on his body. The abrasion indicates that the victim had tried to resist him but the accused managed to overpower her, reports
· 3 Abhishek Bhalla, Hindustan Times, Who is Uma Khurana?
said .A more detailed medical report from Nagpada Hospital in
Mumbai showed injuries on the maid's private parts and scratches on her body, indicating force.
In her police complaint, the maid had alleged, "In the afternoon when I was alone in the house, Shiney came and forced himself on me. I tried to push him away but he gagged and raped me. He also
threatened me of dire consequences and told me not to inform
anybody. I confided to my family only later in the evening when my private parts began hurting. My uncle took me to the police station to lodge a complaint." Shiney was charged under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) Section 376 with rape, along with wrongful restraint and
intimidation. The actor who made his debut in the critically acclaimed Hazaaron Khwayishe Aisi, later worked in several successful Bollywood films such as Bhool Bhulaiya,
Gangster and Life in a Metro. Interestingly, Shiney's wife Anupam Ahuja had launched a spirited defence of her husband braving the media glare and was supported by friends and neighbours.
2.3 The Nirbhaya Gangrape case
The dastardly act of raping and killing Jyoti Singh Pande, (better known as Nirbhaya, student and private tutor) on a cold December night, in 2012, brought the whole of Delhi on the streets, thanks to the activist role played by the media. But there was a downside too.
According to a report published in the International Business Times,
“The nonstop media coverage of a young woman who died after being gang-raped on a Delhi bus is being criticized by local newspapers, media critics, and even some members of India’s Bollywood community.Worldwide, coverage of the incident has spurred
awareness of the brutal sexual assaults that are common in India, but critics in that country say the circuslike, play-by-play media accounts could spur more violence. As demonstrators stormed the capital last week demanding that the government do more to protect women, the Indian Express cautioned that the protest rallies are being
‘amplified and primed up hysterically by the electronic media’ and are “in danger of becoming even more driven by bloodlust.”
According to a report titled ‘Future of Gender Parity’ vis-à-vis Indian Media, ‘changes have not brought about the desired social and
material change in the lives of most Indian women. Despite the longstanding and vigorous women’s movement, patriarchy remains deeply entrenched in India, especially rural India, influencing the structure of its political and social institutions and determining the opportunities open to women and men. Women account for half of the global labor supply and about 70 percent of global consumption
demand. Greater gender equality in educational and employment opportunities fosters faster, more inclusive growth, not only because women are half of the world’s population but also because they are more likely than men to invest in the human capital of their families.’
Coverage Across Media Domains
In the prominent Indian research journal Media Watch, Arpita Sharma puts it succinctly when she observes, “ TV, radio, cinema,
newspapers, magazines and newsletters and technology such as the Internet and E-mail as well as other media may not be as obvious as children's comics and cartoons, theatre, puppetry, dance and song.
The media is a vehicle used to inform as well as entertain the public.
The media is a carrier of information, ideas, thoughts and opinions. It is a powerful force in influencing people’s perceptions on a variety of issues. The media can be both positive as well as negative in terms of the position and views of women as well as a powerful mechanism for education and socialization. Although the media has played an
important role in highlighting women's issues, it has also had negative impact, in terms of perpetrating violence against women through pornography and images of women as a female body that can be bought and sold. Overall, the media treatment of women is narrow and continually reinforces stereotyped gender roles and assumptions that women's functions are that of a wife, mother and servant of men.”
Media Watch further explains the context of the media covering women when it says that the pattern of value in any society is
reflected in the contents of mass communications. The way subjects dealing with women are treated indicated to a great extent the
prevailing attitude of the society towards women.
Communication Revolution, Boon or Bane?
In this regard, the ongoing communication revolution has opened up new possibilities of accelerating the process of upliftment of women.
But if it remains unguided and uncontrolled, this revolution will decelerate the process and it will have adverse effects on the lives of women. Hence it is worthwhile to understand the way in which women are reflected in the print and electronic media in the
country and its influence on viewer’s perception about empowerment of women on society. Media paid scant attention to the warrant issues till 1975. In 1975, the findings of the Committee on National Status of Women revealed that the status of women has been decline steadily.
Since then, the National Commission for women and other
organizations are striving hard to improve the status of Indian women through all means, including different forms of communication for the masses. However, incidental studies on the impact of the mass media indicate that women’s exposure to the media is often marginal and
unsatisfactory. It appears that the mass media has not fulfilled their duty as an effective instrument in the process of empowerment of women. Women are used to encourage the sale of products such as soaps, towels, and detergents. A few years ago, they even banned an advertisement that showed a daughter winking at her father.
Social Factors
In India, social factors play a significant role in reducing women’s labour participation. Husbands and in-laws often discourage women from working, while, in many parts of the country, restrictions are imposed even on their movements outside the household.
In this context, it is notable that labour participation is particularly low in India among urban, educated women — the section of the female society that is, in fact, less likely to be constrained by social factors. In 2009-10, the proportion of those attending to domestic duties (and therefore out of the labour force) was 57 per cent among urban females with graduate degrees or higher, compared to just 31 per cent among rural females with primary or middle school
education.
What are the reasons for such a massive withdrawal of educated women from the work force? Lower wages than men could be one reason. But then female-male wage disparities exist in Japan and South Korea as well, but female labour participation has been high in these countries.
Work Force Perspective
To put things in perspective, we need to factor in what a US-based writer, Sarah Glynn, shared in her article written in 2013: ‘Today, April 9th, is ‘celebrated’ as Pay Equity Day as it marks the number of extra days into 2013 that the average woman must work in order to earn as much as the average man earned in 20124. Naysayers argue that women earn less than men because of the “choices” they make in their lives – choosing to work in less lucrative careers, to work less hours, and to take more time out of the paid labour force to stay home with children or care for elderly relatives. But there is a
preponderance of evidence indicating that something more
complicated is happening than just women voluntarily self-selecting into lower paying careers.
Women on an average make only 77 cents to every dollar earned by men. Some of that wage gap is the result of women being more likely to work in certain industries or occupations, but about 40 percent of the difference in men’s and women’s wages cannot be explained by any measurable factor. And the wage gap is even higher for women of colour, pointing to social factors that go far beyond the choices that women make.’
4 Sarah Glynn, On pay equity day, why women are paid less than men (Retrieved on 20.08.2015)
The Indian media, by and large does not have the social parameters or the courage to show-case women in their true light. Let us now take a cursory look as to how different media streams portray working
women, be it high-paying or low-paying.
3.4 Indian TV Serials
Nidhi Shendunirkar in her research article observes that ‘globalization and technological advancements raised the bar of television as a mass medium, especially after India opened up its economy in 19915. The entry of foreign players in the Indian media landscape provided viewers with a plethora of choices in terms of media content.
However, television’s role as an agent for social and political change was a lost cause. Television became obsessed with the concept of
‘infotainment’ – a combination of ‘information’ and ‘entertainment’
attuned to profits, revenues and ratings
‘The projection of hackneyed and unoriginal female roles presented a glaring distinction between the ‘reel’ and the ‘real’ woman. Though television soaps debate societal issues like marriage, divorce, crime
5Nalanda Tambe and Nidhi Shendurnikar Tere, Where are the real working women in Indian television soaps? (Retrieved on 20.08.2015)
against women, patriarchy, family system; the working Indian woman is conspicuous by her absence.’
Advertising
Aparna Singh in Women’s web made an extremely scathing
observation when she said: ’In case you don’t follow ads yourself, don’t let this selection of noteworthy ads fool you into thinking that working women in India are now abundantly represented in
advertising. The converse is true – unpaid work at home is almost always shown as being done by women.6
The fact is that I (and most people I asked) had to think really hard to come up with a few examples. Freelance Writer Smriti Lamech puts it wryly, “perhaps the most significant thing is that I can’t remember a single ad with a working woman. I’m sure there are plenty but none of them enough to leave an impression. The most played out ads that come back to mind are mothers in sarees with the pallu tucked into the waist (because stay at home moms *only* wear sarees) who either make you bowls of healthy maggi, horlicks or tell you it’s okay if your shirt is covered in mud.”
Evidence seems to suggest that most advertising tends to play safe and working women in India are still seen as ‘exceptional’ characters, not ‘normal’ ones? Even in categories like two-wheelers or cars, with long commutes in metros and more Indian women buying vehicles, few working women are to be found, although ads showing vehicles as “fun” for women are not rare.
Hindi Cinema
In a country where “homely” is the ultimate womanly virtue, it’s only to be expected that its most popular cinema would prefer its heroines be, in a most lady-like manner, unemployed. Over the years,
Bollywood movies have slowly built up to the position that work is something women do when they have no other option (grinding poverty is a favourite cause) unless they’re “man-hating feminists”7.
6 Aparna V. Singh, http://www.womensweb.in/articles/indian-women-in-advertising/ (Retrieved on 20.08.2015)
7 https://indiequill.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/changeabout/ (Retrieved on 20.08.2015)
This might serve to explain why prostitution is such a common profession in the movies, emphasizing the ‘degrading’ nature of the working experience.
The concept of work as something a woman might want to do without it affecting her femininity took time and the involvement of women directors. In Chashme Buddoor, Sai Paranjpe chose to use Deepti Naval’s short-lived career as the Chamko washing powder salesgirl as a plot point and never felt the need to explain it. Similarly, in Farah Khan’s Main Hoon Na, Sushmita Sen is a sexy beauty in traditional Indian wear who’s incidentally a Chemistry professor.
The Jessica Lal Murder Retrial
With the advent of media in every sphere of human life, even the last bastion of protection from prying eyes – the judiciary – seems to have fallen. 8Trial by media made famous, or infamous, by the O J
Simpson Murder case has arrived in full regalia in India with a virtual retrial of the Jessical Lal case where intense protests following a ‘not guilty’ verdict forced the Government to order a retrial. One has the highest respect for the judiciary but the accusation that the media are playing judge, jury and executioner is rooted in a misconception of the role of the media in the new technological age. However,
somewhere there should be the limit. The Indian Constitution
guarantees fair trial. It may be recalled that Jessical Lal was a model and was working as a barmaid in a club. On April 30, 1999, she refused to serve a drink to one Siddharth Vashisht alias Manu Sharma, son of Haryana politician and minister in Haryana
government. On this, Manu got furious and fired at her twice and killed her on the spot. Later on, after much publicity and
demonstrations, the case was reopened and he was found to be the culprit and sentenced to life imprisonment
Women Editors Put Things in Perspective
8 http://internationalpoliticalforum.com/the-role-of-the-media-in-jessica-lals-murder-case/ (Retrieved on 20.08.2015)
However, two observations by prominent media editors best sums up the issue of how the media covers working women. Meenal Baghel, editor, Mumbai Mirror, candidly admitted the lapses of her paper in the past pointing out that newsrooms had their limitations and imperfections. The pressure in a newsroom was akin to that felt by doctors working in emergency wards, she said. In the working process one did sometimes get de-sensitised but by and large the process of questioning the treatment of this issue has begun in media circles.
9She pointed out that Mumbai Mirror had never used the euphemism
“eve teasing,” and this was the outcome of a conscious decision.
While much reporting happens in an ad hoc, with no hard and fast rules, the newsroom is definitely more discerning and sensitive today than it was in the past.
Kalpana Sharma, former Deputy Editor of The Hindu states : Over all these years haven’t women gained expertise to be able to express their knowledge? Due to this fact that it has always been men, you have to take that conscious effort to correct that balance by
ensuring that the opinions of women are incorporated. Similarly in reporting, now at least there is some consciousness in the use of noun and pronoun; like ‘he’ and ‘she’10. There are many editors now who consciously say “she and her”. The editors specifically write “she”
because we have always said “he”. It’s a small token thing which is important. Moreover, gender neutral terms like “journalists” and
“reporters” are also being used but that is not enough.
9 http://www.nwmindia.org/about-us/national-meet-news/52-women-violence-and-the-public-space-how- the-media-can-tell-that-story-better (Retrieved on 20.08.2015)
10 http://www.thealternative.in/society/kalpana-sharma-on-the-indian-medias-representation-of- women/?print=print (Retrieved on 20.08.2015)
Let’s Sum Up
After having traversed the gamut of media coverage of working women in this module, we need to understand the dynamics of working women in Indian society, and consequently, the way Indian media portrays them. At the outset, we learnt that only 24 per cent of able-bodied women comprise the workforce. Of this, the majority belong to the rural areas and work either in the agricultural fields or in the unorganized sector. They comprise the majority of the low-paid workers but their coverage in the media is marginalized. They are showed as victims, or in
supporting roles and never as productive members, contributing to the nation’s economy. We also saw that the media has been largely fair to high-paying working women, largely living in urban areas. Both the brighter and darker spots in Indian
media’s coverage of working women is seen its highlighting cases like those of Jessical Lal, Uma Khurana, or that of the maid who was assaulted by Bollywood cine-star Shiney Ahuja who managed to get away ostensibly because he belonged to the upper strata of Indian society. But Indian media also managed to play the activist
role by highlighting the plight of the Delhi gangrape victim Jyoti Singh Pandey (better know as Nirbhaya) and consequently, how archaic rape laws were changed in the wake of massive public outcry.
