Re-thinking

The thing is this - I saw this great documentary recently which has had me thinking a lot. Trouble is, it's off the air now and I feel like kicking myself for not writing about it here earlier.

The film is called 'The trouble with working women'. It explores the various views about women, work, and what is considered women's work. In doing so, as is perhaps expected, it raised more questions than there are straight-forward answers for. Men calling women the 'inferior' specimen of the species, women refusing to hire other women of child-bearing age, and men making pregnancy and maternity-friendly policies at work, house-husbands who have consciously chosen to stay at home and look after children while the wife goes out to earn for the family, women who started support groups for battered women and now believe that there is actually some such thing as 'too much equality' which goes against the interests of women, women working 19 hour days to have it all - the family and the career. Nothing new about it, just the approach of two rational presenters investigating why things are so complicated for women.

One voice stood out for me, and that's the voice I have been thinking about since. It was the voice of one woman who fought for women's right to equality in the '70s. Having believed in radical politics for the bulk of her life, she said she thinks differently now. Why? She said she would have thought and behaved differently back then too, if she had children then.

The gravity of that statement is immense and hit me only once I got thinking. It is a fact, one thinks differently once a child is born. New life is so completely dependant, it needs someone to give up everything to care for it, with one hundred percent focus. Whether one likes it or not, that is the fact. Nature has chosen the woman to execute that role, and as far as biology is concerned, I don't see any job-sharing happening. This is the crux of the problem, and it is around this fundamental that any debate over genuine equality needs to work. Whether it is brought about biologically or socially, equality has to address the gap that child-bearing and child-rearing create in a woman's life.

As the programme headed for a heartbreakingly depressing end, the only saving grace was the supreme optimism of the presenters - and their conclusion that though women earn less than men at the workplace, their lives are 'richer'. As I was about to boo the ending down, I held myself back. I know what they mean - a man can never understand what it means to have a line joining you with your baby, the attachment that you have for your child, and no, it is not humbug - by negating emotions so intensely felt by so many women we only trivialise our experiences. Yet we have a long way to go if women's lives are to be truly rich, if not richer - and equal pay for equal work is a good place to start.

Oh for some refuge in the non-controversial, less draining and rather uplifting world of natural phenomenon! If you, like me, are feeling entirely spent by the unfairness of the gender divide, I invite you to the wonderful world of weather, or rather, the wonderful weathers of the world. A series of documentaries study the science behind weather and it's historical understanding and how it influences our social behaviour. Off to have the mystery of the hexagonal snowflake revealed!