The following happened a few months ago when winter was at its death throes and spring was in the air: The Dhaka weather was at its most pleasant, the summer scorch still a month away.
I went to the customer service section of a local cell phone company; I am a subscriber. I was having trouble with the Internet connection of my phone, so I went there, got myself a token with the serial number of the queue written on it, and seated myself between two other “gentlemen” who were also waiting.
The man on my left, with stubble from not having shaved a few days, was very fidgety; he was complaining about the delay in receiving service in muffled grunts and asides. He looked ragged and tired; a man who works a lot for a meager compensation. He couldn’t resist telling me that he had earlier lost his phone and was there to get a replacement SIM card.
He started by complaining about thieves and the inefficiency of the authorities in enforcing the law, but gradually, his anger had the better of him. He pointed to a lady service provider and commented: “Look at that lazy ‘beti.’ She seems to be dozing instead of working.” I gave him a look of astonishment; he hadn’t a clue about his indiscretion. The men on the customer service booths didn’t catch his eye for any derelictions of duty.
The man on the right immediately responded to this woman-bashing and commented, “all these betis are no good; they just sit there and powder their noses.” He looked at me and the man on the left and smirked as if he was making a statement of obvious “truth.” I got up and decided to sit somewhere else. The two men now joined in conversation after taking a look at “this foolish baldy wearing a red t-shirt” (me) and probably settled into a lengthy discussion on the superiority of males. I didn’t stop to listen.
All through the rest of my stay there, I thought over and over again as to what made them talk like that about women. I could only conclude that they had never been taught to respect women -- not mothers, not sisters, not wives, not even daughters. They had seen their fathers treat their mothers like dirt, and had grown up with the idea that women are an inferior lot.
The misogyny one encounters in everyday life is almost accepted as a social norm. Men somehow think that a woman is incomplete as a human being -- a woman’s place is within the domicile. Religious teachers, quite often, do not realise that what they preach as special concession to women in the home and the world is nothing less than condescending to them. An educated woman deserves just as much right to go to the world outside, seek a job, and if successful, carry on with the responsibilities that that job entails. Many men blinded by misogynistic bias only think of these working women as people who are keeping men out of jobs that they should have had in the first place.
Charlotte Brontë wrote in Shirley: “If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women: They do not read them in a true light, they misapprehend them, both for good and evil; their good woman is a queer thing, half-doll, half-angel, their bad woman almost always a fiend.”
With half the population of the country being women, this country will never take a leap forward if women stay indoors and spend their time bearing and rearing babies and keeping tabs on all the household chores. The principal export industry, the apparel industry, would never have stood on its feet had it not been for the women workers, who had broken the shackles of the social stereotype, both in the villages and in the lower-income group inhabited shanties of towns.
A mention should also be made of the women who work with the men of the family in the production of food -- rice paddy, wheat, jute, etc. There is usually no addition in the calculation of the cost of production of the relentless toil that a common village woman puts. The work is expected of them.
I hardly need to mention the salary discrepancies between male and female workers in various construction sites within cities. I know from personal business experience that women who unload cargo vessels, carrying big boulders or sand in flimsy cane baskets are never given the same wages. A man is also paid a higher wage when it comes to manually breaking big boulders into stone chips which are then sent to the construction sites. The situation is quite atrocious in rice mills and brick kilns too.
Women nowadays are getting more and more into higher institutions of learning and they don’t only study the arts subjects, which allow the chauvinist to push them to teaching jobs -- a glorified cage, at times. But women today are doing very well in various technical subjects, getting business degrees with specialties in management finance, accounting, marketing etc. They will keep giving men tougher and tougher challenges in the job market.
But even after getting a good job, alas, quite often than not, they face latent or blatant sexual harassment. Actually, the basics of what constitute sexism are not at all registered in the frontal lobe of many of their male colleagues.
Coming back to my experience at the customer care office of the phone company, my number came up, and I approached the counter and I had difficulty explaining my problem (my mind was buzzing with two male chauvinist voices having a conversation). By the way, I saw the lady, under question, working tirelessly to meet the demands (some of which were ridiculous) of the subscribers. She offered them brochures that would explain various packages, got up, and brought them papers from some other table. She went about her business with immense patience.
I take my hat off to all the women in this country who are working amidst such malevolence from the males. Life is a series of tribulations for many of them, if not all.