Engineered by women

JUST outside South Africa's most beautiful city of Cape Town is a resort which one normally associates with the nouveau riche. Hideous gold covered statues spoil an other wise nice lawn leading to Spier "village" - the village being strictly artificial. This happened to be the place where a meeting, attended largely by men - many of them in suits despite the hot weather -, where the dry subject of the future of large dams was discussed.

The gender divide at this meeting was interesting. The few women who attended, either as former commissioners of the World Commission on Dams, or as members of the Stakeholders' Forum (consisting of people on both sides of the so-called "dams divide") were from the area of social sciences or were activists. The men included engineers, economists, environmentalists and activists. As far as I could see, there was not a single woman engineer.

Yet engineering is a subject where the gender divide has been breached. But it has clearly happened too recently for women to rise to the top of the some of the large engineering establishments around the world. And if they have come up through the ranks, they must have knocked their heads hard against the reinforced glass ceiling.

One wonders if a similar meeting is convened after two decades, whether the situation will be any different, whether the genders will continue to be divided as "soft" and "hard" subjects with a few exceptional breaches here and there. Is the real problem that women in areas like engineering have not yet reached a critical mass to make their presence felt, or is it something else?

My attention was drawn to the issue when I received an invitation from women students of the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. For the first time, March 8 - International Women's Day - will be celebrated at an institution where women are a minority. This column is being written before the event. After it, the story might be different. But the fact that something like this is being attempted is commendable.

The women students of the Mumbai IIT decided that this year they would not only celebrate March 8 but also put forward certain concrete demands to the management. Their main demand is the constitution of a women's cell that would look into complaints of sexual harassment. This, they feel, will go a long way in promoting a policy of gender equality at the IIT.

In their note on this, they state: "In recent years, it has been observed that women's capabilities on campus have been conspicuously diminished through various forms of discriminatory practices which are in violation of their right to live and work without fear and with dignity."

The very fact that such a suggestion has come forward, and in such detail - the women have formulated the exact nature of the cell, how it should function, who should be on it, and how it deals with complaints - suggests that the problem of sexual harassment has existed for some time. In the past, women students probably never came together. In the highly competitive atmosphere in such elite institutions, students' solidarity on issues that could lead to a clash with the authorities is rare. As women constitute a small minority in such institutions, many hesitate to raise their voices on issues related to gender. In most such situations, women generally prefer to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible, "one of the lads", so to speak. But obviously even this does not protect them from harassment. This year, the women at IIT have clearly found the courage to make an open demand on an issue that has simmered for some time.

I narrate this story particularly for the interest of the scores of engineering students - men and women - who responded to one of my previous columns in which I had quoted a letter from a woman student at an engineering college in Kerala. The majority of the letters appreciated the column, and the courage of the student who wrote about the situation in her college. But the column also triggered off a virtual flood of mail from another college in Tamil Nadu where the situation seems to be much worse. Here the problem is not sexual harassment, but denial of the right of men and women to even converse with one another in a normal way. The result is a virtual sexual apartheid where the men and women are separated - they even have separate entrances!

Clearly, the answer to sexual harassment is not the separation of the sexes. Women only or men only colleges do not reduce the incidence of sexual harassment on the streets or outside the colleges. On the contrary, some argue that separate institutes of higher learning exacerbate the problem.

But as the IIT women students suggest, even if they study in co- educational institutions where such unreasonable restrictions are not enforced, sexual harassment does not stop. For the reality is that sexual harassment is about power, it arises from the desire of men to control women, to show their power over them through violence and intimidation. The so-called "eve-teasing" is not flattery or appreciation of women; it is aimed to show women their place as sexual objects. When these things happen in institutions where men and women have entered on an equal footing to be trained for professions which are not gender specific, it is all the more exasperating to the women.

It will be interesting to watch if the lead taken by the IIT, Mumbai women is followed up by other women studying in engineering and technical institutes. Given that this country has a specific law on sexual harassment and the Supreme Court has set out guidelines that should be followed by such institutes, the women are well within their rights to make such demands.

KALPANA SHARMA

E-mail the writer at ksharma@vsnl.com

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Previous : Crisis in agriculture
Next     : On the rocks