Tackling a public health crisis like Covid-19 that shadows any pandemic since the Great Influenza of 1918 is already a huge challenge for governments across the world. Making it even more tense is the fact that it is threatening to deepen existing gender inequities, ravaging prospects for women’s progress on all fronts.  

Increased Workload

Women already face a wide gap in employment, wages and education. 

Millions of women are under stress due to increased domestic workloads during the pandemic. Cooking, cleaning and rearing children while also handling office work, is taking a heavy toll on them. Their responsibility to care for the elderly has also shot up as hospitals are overworked and sending mild or asymptomatic cases home for treatment. Women’s greater involvement in the “care economy” also affects their work life.

 Social distancing norms have translated into additional privation for women. In millions of middle-class Indian homes, hired domestic help — part-time cooks, cleaners and nannies — are an integral part of the domestic architecture. However, this structure has come crashing down due to missing service providers, passing on this burden to women in households.

Even highly educated Indian women still bear the primary responsibility for raising children and managing the home. Indian men are rarely known to pitch in with housework unless they have worked or lived abroad. Thanks to patriarchal mindsets, men who help with house chores are often termed “hen-pecked” or not “manly” enough. Men also often have a misplaced sense of pride in their inability to roll out chapattis, change diapers or help with children’s homework.

Economic woes have already hit women far harder simply because of social inequities. Their health and education are compromised; they are burdened with unpaid work caring for others and they are grappling with gender-based violence from frustrated spouses due to close confinement during the lockdown.

As much as a third of married women in India have reported experiencing spousal physical, sexual or emotional violence. 

 

Setting Right Gender Inequality

To be fair, the Indian government has been working to make society more inclusive. Gender-responsive budgeting is being pursued. In March 2017, India enacted a landmark law mandating that all employers offer 26 weeks of paid maternity leave. Steps have also been taken to advance women’s financial inclusion through the Aadhaar program, the largest digital national identification initiative undertaken anywhere in the world.

Women-centric schemes such as Beti Padhao; Beti Bachao (save the girl child by educating her) and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which mandates equal wages for men and women and includes provisions for childcare at work sites, have helped improve gender parity. Consequently, education levels of Indian women have risen; fertility rates have plunged; and access to electricity, cooking gas and water has improved.

 

Women & Health

Women are considered to be a backbone of a family and it would not be wrong to say even of the society. Women as a ‘mother’ is the first institution from where we all get our fundamental lessons for life. Since time immemorial women are shouldering responsibilities in running the family and taking care of the family. In ancient times when medical care was not established in rural areas as it is now, it was the women who used to take care of the family’s health needs by home remedies, using spices and herbs from the kitchen, making herbal decoctions, using plant parts etc. for prophylactic and therapeutic purposes.

Keeping the women of the house healthy is essential because a healthy woman will make a healthy home. Because women represent the cornerstone of a family's overall health, ensuring they have access to quality care also can lead to improved health for children and families. Women were healthier than they are now. Culprits being industrialization leading to pollution of food, air, and water, lifestyle changes after the advent of machines and gadgets leading to lack of physical movement and flexibility, etc. are the cause of deterioration of women’s health. Earlier women used to toil hard in fields, cook food for the family and take care of the family too now life has become sedentary, cooks have taken the charge of the kitchen and nannies are raising the kids. These changes are not only affecting the health of the family but in turn, is leading to a diseased society and nation at large.

It is high time to return to our roots, unfollow the trends of the west and relearn the good old practices which our grandmothers and mothers followed. Only self-reliance can come only by self-health reliance. 

 

 

 

 

 

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