Equal not same same

Illustration/Uday Mohite

A government school in Kerala has created a new ‘uniform' uniform code: instead of gender-assigned uniforms of skirts for girls and pants for boys, everyone will now wear pants. This is being greeted with customary kudos as a move towards gender equality.

When it comes to gender equality, being ‘the same as men' is presented as aspirational. This leaves much unquestioned. It glosses over the idea that all men are not the same and several inequalities remain unaddressed in this idea of sameness. It leaves the hierarchy of what is superior unchallenged. Women wearing pants, associated with men, is marked as modern, which means the superiority of masculinity goes unquestioned. Finally, it assumes that the mindsets of those who make rules are automatically progressive, thus preserving their authority.

As the school itself said, young women were already wearing pants at home. So why not simply add a choice instead of a compulsion? When you turn a box upside down, things do move around a bit, but they also still remain in a box.

How would people have responded if the uniform became skirts, or any other women's clothing, for everyone? Where does this rule leave students who would like to wear skirts - sex or gender notwithstanding? What about leaving it to students to decide which of three or four choices they would like to wear? Could a new dress code have been co-created with students?

The Union Cabinet has approved raising the legal minimum age of marriage of women from 18 to 21 to ‘bring it on par with boys', the implication being that once the age of marriage changes, equality will follow. This deflects attention from many thorny questions. It's said this will improve maternal mortality, but research shows that it is poverty that impacts maternal mortality, rather than early marriage. It is claimed this will increase women's education, but research shows it is really the other way around - better education increases the age of marriage organically. According to the fourth National Family Health Survey, of girls who dropped out of school almost 20 per cent reported the reason was the high cost of education, 14.5 per cent because of the burden of unpaid household work and for many no school was nearby. Only 7.9 per cent cited early marriage as a reason.

This also assumes that all is well with marriage. But does marriage at 22 ensure equality within marriage? Is a person of 22 ensured the right to marry a person of their choice? Is it possible to think of what women want and need in terms other than marriage and motherhood? Then the question arises, where should efforts of change lie? In bolstering the agency of women that will organically alter the age of marriage and the nature of marriage, or simply raising the age while leaving the systemic issues untouched? To what extent can young women be co-creators of a law that will affect them?

The quick, glib, social media wah-wahs that followed the announcement on age of marriage reveal how little we pause to think about the meaning of equality, which asks us first of all to question our own assumptions about good-ness, and making the world in our own image. The solutions we then make might not be so uniform.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com