'Othering' of the first sex

A major conversation around the world today is about what Edward Said describes as 'othering'.

The concept of 'othering' depends on using shorthand identifiers to create distinct social groupings based on the use of seemingly natural binary opposites ­— black/white, heterosexual/homosexual, citizen/alien, sane/insane, able-bodied/disabled, male/female. In an increasingly alienated world, these binaries help in creating a sense of identity & belongingness that comes with membership and a higher sense of self with membership in a group deemed superior.

The "Us vs Them" narrative is tearing lives apart by triggering discrimination among people who are not similarly situated at a point of time in history. It's not tough for a debate of this nature, in the times that we live in, to gain a major ground. This is especially true given that polarisation has become the monkey on the backs of our mainstream media and made it a setup that is hell-bent on putting people in compartments and instigating them to confront each other for reasons divorced from either reason or fact. People everywhere, from drawing-rooms to news-rooms – armed with a quiver of myths and folklores – can be seen shooting arguments at each other in order to win a supposed battle that they believe to be both brave and necessary.

However, even amidst all the obsession with exploring differences and attempts at gauging the genesis of this hysteria, there's one 'othering' that remains relegated to the background in this race to put a dent in the "collective conscience" of our society. This is the disenfranchisement of women from positions of leadership.

As early as the 1950s, Simone de Beauvoir explained in her seminal feminist work, The Second Sex, how socialisation governs our understanding of what it is to be 'man' or 'woman'. She particularly focused on how the patriarchal value system sets up women as the 'Other' of man and defines her not in relation to herself but as what is not 'man'. It's strange how this 'othering' is just not seen to have enough momentum to ever be in the chart of debate and discourse. This is considering the fact that deliberate and well-oiled apartheid persists, right under our noses, to push our women out of the ladder on account of being not male.

The facts are not very far for anyone to see. For, in this case, the home is where the hurt is.

India, a country with 31 chief ministers and an enrolment of over 421,141,073 women voters, can today afford to have only a single woman chief minister. Among the 24 cabinet ministers in the Government of India, only three are women. India not only does not have a woman Cabinet Secretary, she has never had one. India has never had a woman as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. India has never seen a woman as Chairperson of the Bar Council of India. India has also never seen a woman President of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India. Per the latest NIRF rankings, not one out of the top ten universities in the country is headed by a woman. None of the top ten companies by market capital are headed by women. Not one woman is Managing Director/Chairperson of any Maharatna Public Sector Undertaking. No woman has ever been Chairperson of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). There has been one woman Chief Election Commissioner of India since the institution was founded in 1950. There has been only one woman Director General of the DRDO in its 61 years old history. There has been only one woman head of ASSOCHAM in its 99 years old history. There have been only two women Presidents of FICCI in its 92 years old history. This is by no means an exhaustive list but only a sign of the symptom.

This sinister boycott of women from positions of leadership, however, makes no sense other than acquiescing to the fact that our society has trained itself into observing abilities in men and inabilities in women. Numerous studies indicate that women possess higher leadership potential than men.

A study isn't required to prove that women show a relatively higher interest in people than men. And, leadership does involve dealing with people and not things, something with which men can claim to have a relative advantage.

In our heads – partly owing to years of internalisation and rough-hewn precedents – leadership potential is imposed with an image of the toxic alpha-male characteristics.

Our leaders, in our heads, are meant to be like lions. And the followers must as Devdutt Patnaik highlights in his book Leader- 50 Insights from Mythology, be like lionesses, afraid of and subservient to the lion.

"When a lion takes over a pride, it kills all the cubs fathered by the previous alpha male," highlights Patnaik, "Having taken over a pride, he rests, leaving all the hunting to the lioness. When the lionesses hunt prey, they make way and allow the lion to eat his fill before they feed themselves. Thus, in a pride, the lionesses do all the work, while the lion enjoys the fruit of their labor."

Our world is no different than the jungle. When I see around me, in classrooms, in factories, in offices, in market places, on the streets, I see women outperforming and sometimes, also outnumbering men. However, as I try to trace their journey upwards, they go missing.

I can't help but recall Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai who put it gently and well when she said, "the higher you go, the fewer women there are". And it has to be the truth, for there has been a male-morphosis of all the characteristics required to be a leader. All the toxic characteristics embedded in an alpha-male have come to be perceived as potential leadership traits. When it comes to choosing a leader, our society prefers arrogance over humility, loudness over wisdom, confidence over competence and belligerence over strength.

Humility and wisdom are seen as weaknesses in someone aspiring to be a leader.

The worst impact of this can be seen in women who have to mimic 'masculine' characteristics in order to justify their capabilities as leaders.

Men may generally have more physical power than women. But though we may seem to be regressing to the medieval ages, things haven't gone as far south as the stone-age yet. We do not need leaders with brute herculean strength to kill wild animals or to break through mountains.

What we do need is leaders who can look ahead. Men can no further be allowed to be considered the virtual default.

We cannot undo all that we have done to our women. What we can do is make another start by bringing them into our conversations of leadership with acceptance in our hearts that women are as much the default as a male human can be and therefore, the first sex.

They have been patient all this while. We shouldn't expect it anymore.

They must lead. We need it more than they do.

(Chandan Karmhe is a Delhi University law graduate, Chartered Accountant and an alumnus of IIM-Ahemdabad. Views expressed are strictly personal)