Women are a strange species. It is hard to read them. If we change too much, they tell you, “Tum bahut badal gaye ho” (You have changed a lot). If you don’t change, they tell you, “Tum waise ki waise ho (You are the same as you were), grow up, become mature.”
Is it so strange then that men ask, what do women want?
I will try to answer this question through five stories.
Story 1.
A year ago, PayTM called together 30 people from both genders, of varying ages and backgrounds to do a study. This video is the result of that study.
Story 2.
Aruna had screwed up on her project and she knew she had let her manager down. She wanted to make it right and offered to work over the weekend to fix the issue. But it meant she would have to work from the hospital. She was on leave for the coming week because her little daughter was going in for a surgery. Her manager was aware of this.
“I have 10 other people on the team, your daughter has only one mother. I don’t want you working on this from the hospital. If it becomes urgent, someone will pick it up. If it doesn’t, you can come back and pick it up.”
A few months later, in a conversation, Aruna told me that she had applied to and gotten into a company much bigger than the one we were at. But after considering it, she refused the offer which gave her a significantly higher remuneration. When I asked her why, she replied, “At this stage, I need this guy as my manager more than I need the money or the brand the other company can offer me.”
Story 3.
Kripa works in a team of seven, where two are women and the rest are men. One Friday, Kripa and her colleague Shalini, met up for after-work beers at the nearby pub. Kripa, who only smoked while drinking, offered Shalini a cigarette. She knew Shalini smoked, since she often joined her male colleagues when they stepped out for a smoke. Shalini refused the offered cigarette saying she hated the smell of cigarette smoke. She explained that the only reason she joined the men on their smoke breaks was because a lot of decisions get made during those smoke breaks, and she didn’t want to be left out. She urged Kripa to join the breaks too, if she wanted her career to take-off.
Story 4.
Brenda is in a sales role and it requires her to travel to various cities to meet her company’s retail partners. On some of these trips, she is joined by her manager. When they check-in at hotels, they would get knowing looks from the hotel staff. They would be asked questions such as, “Do you want adjacent rooms?”
To avoid the embarrassment of these situations, she suggested that they travel separately. This meant that they never had to check in to hotels at the same time. Brenda’s manager is a really cool guy and she loves her conversations with him. He treats her with respect and gives her all the opportunities available to the men in the team. She feels she learns a lot from their conversations. Travelling together would give her quality time with her boss.
Story 5.
In 1999, there were two medications under consideration by the Ministry of Health and Welfare in Japan. The application for one of those medications had been filed over a decade ago and it will still awaiting approval, while the approval for the other drug was rushed through in six months. The first drug in this case was a low-dose contraception pill that would allow women to have more control over their choices and their lives. The second one was Viagra that allowed 60-year-old men to continue to perform in bed.
What do women want?
It’s simple actually. They just want to be recognized as people, as individuals. In each of the stories today, we see women having to choose between their careers or aspirations and their responsibilities. We see them having to give up opportunities. But do they need to? Does it have to be an either-or?
Even more insidious is how we use a common brush to paint an whole sex when it comes to pointing out their shortcomings, but we refuse to use the same brush when it comes to positives.
For instance, how many times have we noticed a woman driving badly and commented about “women drivers”. But if you stop and think about it, we encounter more bad drivers who are men than women. But we never say “men drivers” in exasperation. Just last week, I told myself to be aware of all the bad driving I saw on my way to work. There were at least six, all six by men.
The only real difference between men and women is that one of them can bear children and the other cannot. Everything else can be learned and mastered through practice. If any one of us men here got into a ring with Mary Kom or Lovlina Borgohain today, we would be soundly thrashed.
Avani Chaturvedi, Mohana Singh Jitarwal, and Bhawana Kanth were the first three women to be inducted as combat pilots in the Indian Air Force. This happened only in 2019. Is it because women can’t fly? No, it’s because we BELIEVE women can’t fly combat missions. But then, neither can you or I, does it mean men can’t?
It is all about practice and opportunity. It is about removing the roadblocks in their path. If a man needs a toilet at his place of work, is it so hard to understand that a woman needs one too? Why is a men’s toilet not seen as an overhead, when a woman’s toilet is?
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