Flip the switch

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Sometimes, all you need to understand discrimination is to flip the switch.

Let me explain with an example. Recently, I watched a brilliant ad on Instagram made by a content creator, Vir Bhaan Saini, in partnership with a clothing brand, XYXX Crew, titled ‘If Baniyans Were Bras’. In the opening shot, a father sees a bra hanging on the clothesline and angrily calls out to his son. He snatches the towel off his son’s shoulder and covers not the bra, but the baniyan hanging beside it.

In the next shot, three women lean over a young man wearing a transparent shirt in a bus and giggle as they try to catch a glimpse of his baniyan .

Then, a woman walks up to her boyfriend and quickly zips up his blazer so his green baniyan and chest are no longer visible. Scolding him, she says, “ Tere ko chahiye na, doosre ladki log tere ko dekhe? (You want girls to look at you, right?).”

The scene I liked best was a man coming home and, with a sigh of relief, slipping off his baniyan without even taking off his T-shirt — the way women often do with their bras at the end of a long day.

Ten years ago, I had used the flip-the-switch experiment while co-authoring an opinion piece for The Hindu . The then DMK government had paved the way for abolishing the practice of hereditary appointments of priests to Hindu temples, implying that the sanctum sanctorum of temples was now open to non-Brahmins. In the piece , my former colleague Sruthisagar Yamunan and I asked why there was comparatively little noise or demand on the question of gender equality in religious spaces. In short, where were the women priests?

This week, we carried a piece about how there is a social stigma attached to inhalers used by those with asthma. Dr. Lancelot Pinto wrote , “This can be worse for women given societal conditioning, and expectations at home and the workplace. Women may feel compelled to hide their condition or discontinue treatment, even at the cost of their well-being.” The piece said parents sometimes stop their asthmatic daughters from using inhalers, fearing that they will be seen as imperfect or disabled in the marriage market. Would a man’s asthma be treated as a deal-breaker in the same way? The question is not just about social attitudes; it also reflects a larger problem in how we understand women’s health.

We can apply the test to the workplace as well. In a piece published last week, Santosh Mehrotra and Jajati Keshari Parida argued that “a 10-percentage-point increase in India’s female WPR (worker-population ratio) could add nearly two percentage points to GDP growth...” The article went on to list the many ways in which higher female workforce participation would benefit the economy. And I again wondered: isn’t it depressing that we constantly have to argue about why more women should work in jobs that pay them in money, but almost never feel the need to justify men’s place in the workforce?

But the week before last was heartening if we applied the same experiment.