Gender Agenda newsletter | Pocket Patriarchy

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This week, KFC, the denim label Pinheads, and the creative innovation company R/GA teamed up to create denim pockets that can be attached to women’s clothes. These pockets will be big enough to fit the KFC Pockett, which is a Mexican-style wrap.

It is a clever marketing campaign before International Women’s Day. The humble pocket is not a trivial issue; for women, it continues to be a myth. So much so that when women do find pockets in their clothes, they are so thrilled that they post photos on social media and write opeds about it.

Most adults use pockets to keep their wallets and phones, or store loose change. Without pockets, women carry handbags or purses. But these are obvious, burdensome ways of carrying money and other necessities, making it harder for some Indian women to exercise financial freedom in the ways that they — and not just their families — want. This is perhaps why many women carefully tuck money into their blouses, beneath the folds of their saree, where it cannot be accessed by others or stolen.

Money is precious for everyone, but especially for many women, since they continue to have substantially less of it compared to men. Fewer women are in the formal workforce too: as the Time Use Survey, released last week by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, pointed out, 25% of women participated in employment-related activities in 2024 compared to 75% of men.

Even women who are not in the labour force do work — and don’t get paid for it. The problem is that what they do is not counted as work, since it does not produce an output that can be sold in the marketplace or consumed outside the family. As Abhishek Waghmare wrote in Data For India, “…transporting the harvested vegetables to the market for sale is work, but cooking those vegetables for the household members to eat…is not considered work.”

The Time Use survey found that women spend 201 minutes a day more than men on unpaid domestic services, such as cooking and scooping gunk out of the sink. Women also spend 65 minutes more than men a day on unpaid care work, such as changing nappies and helping the elderly use the bathroom.

Women naturally then have less time for employment and related activities, production of goods for their own personal use (such as repairing a broken household item), learning, and leisure, which leaves many of them feeling exhausted, unfulfilled, and resentful. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex, “Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition.”

Anecdotal evidence, such as the backlash that the movie Mrs received online for simply showing this gendered division of labour, suggests that many men are yet to change their attitudes towards it. As Sreerupa and Harshita point out, the first step to solve the problem is to recognise the full spectrum of such invisible work, then expand access to affordable care infrastructure, and redistribute care work.

Meanwhile, the good news is that women are spending 10 minutes less a day on domestic services than they were in 2019. It’s not much, but it’s something. With more free time, the hope is that they will also be able to go out and earn more money, to put into their yet-to-be-sewn pockets.

Toolkit

The longlist of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, established in 1996 to amplify women’s voices around the world, was announced last week. It includes Heart Lamp by Kannada writer Banu Mushtaq, who, in 12 short stories, captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. “I cannot sit quietly if I witness something that I don’t agree with,” said the firebrand writer in an interview with The Hindu.

Wordsworth

Gender dysphoria: This is the psychological distress that a person feels when there is a marked incongruence between the gender they were assigned at birth and their expressed or experienced gender identity. On February 26, the U.S. Department of Defense announced that service members and recruits with gender dysphoria are “incompatible” with U.S. military service and be removed.

Somewhere someone said something stupid

“Is this a female referee?…Why don’t you go and make gnocchi?…She doesn’t understand a f…, she’s a woman.”

Commentator on a young referee at a youth soccer match in Rome

People we met

Priya Babu, a transwoman activist, runs the Trans Resource Center in Madurai. She dropped out of school, unable to withstand sexual abuse and violence, and ran away from home. Realising the importance of education, she began the resource centre in 2016, which facilitates employment and educational opportunities, ensures access to healthcare, helps with legal advice, and entrepreneurial opportunities for the trans community. Priya is excited about International Women’s Day. “I always felt like a woman, but to look like a woman took years of surgeries and medication,” she says. “This is an important day for me because it was such a long journey towards womanhood.”