A middle-aged woman roamed the streets with a bag of colorful wax crayons. She stopped at public walls and gates, filling them with what seemed like incoherent sentences, insignificant dates, and fragments of a geography lesson. When the walls were painted to cover her marks, she returned. Scribbling, re-writing, and overwriting on them again and again.

This the story of Deepa Saxena, a former teacher who, for the past ten years, has been inscribing her words on the walls of Meerut; a small town in Northern India. When asked why she continued to do so, Saxena, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, told the Times Of India in 2014, “I write on the walls for I’ve no one to talk to, nobody wants to listen to my story. I need some way to express my thoughts, which is why I pen them down on the walls.”

A year later, Palak Mittal, a Delhi-based photographer, would decide to listen and tell this narrative of mental anguish through her haunting photo series —The Woman Who Conquered Town. Mital was visiting Meerut, her hometown, for the summer holidays when she first noticed  

Saxena’s writings on almost every street wall in the town’s cantonment area; at times as far as a 5km radius. She found it odd that nobody talked about these writings, and when she asked around the answer was curt if not unconvincing; it’s by the crazy lady in town.  

While the common consensus seemed that Saxena’s mental illness was a result of being abandoned by her husband, Mittal later found that she was never married. As Mittal sifted through urban legends and facts, some part of the truth began to reveal itself. “Her parents were very selfish and dependent on her. She never really invested in her own personal life. When everyone she knew went away or died she became lonely,” says 23-year-old Mittal, who was in touch with Saxena’s family friend. “Though I have never really spoken to her personally because  I don’t think it’s fair for me to bring back her trauma.” She prefers to refer to Saxena as ‘the lady.’

Mittal’s photo series is a heartbreaking revelation of apathy not only towards Saxena but to most people who seek mental health care in India. An estimated 150 million people across India — that is larger than the entire population of Japan— are in need of mental health care interventions, both short and long-term, according to India’s latest National Mental Health Survey 2015-16. The survey also found that, depending on the state, between 70% and 92% of those in need of mental health care failed to receive any treatment. Which further accounts for the reason why in India one student commits suicide every hour.

However, Mittal has stayed away from statistics in her work. “Mental health has always been something that has been going on in somebody’s head and you really cannot see it,” she says. “That is why I think photography is the best medium for this story. Here the suffering is tangible.”

I caught up with Mittal to chat about her experience of capturing these wounded walls of Meerut, the stories she uncovered through them and India’s relationship with mental health conversations.   

Payal Mohta: Did you find that that Saxena’s writings were able to tell her story?

Palak Mittal: The writings on the walls might seem hazy but if you study them closely they are very precise. They state clear bank details, dates and people’s names, in both English and Hindi. The lady is calling those people out who refused to help her and even financially cheated or deserted her. Another theme that recurs is of marriage and divorce. There is this one phrase that she wrote that keeps coming back to me —’Why Indian Girl Must Marry.’ It’s so relatable because women across different sections of Indian society find that marriage becomes more of a regulation that comes with age rather than choice.

What was the most challenging part of shooting the story?

The biggest challenge of this project was to be able to capture and allow the viewers to know the magnitude of it. The lady has written all over town, sometimes as much as through a 500 meter stretch of walls. To show this scale with my camera took a bit of strategizing. I finally decided to do a few panoramic photographs where a wider area can be captured in a single frame.

Did you find yourself drawn to any one particular wall?

Yes, I did. There are these set of walls belonging to a convent school around my home which has verses from the Bible inscribed on it. These phrases are written in English and then translated into Hindi. It is on these walls that the lady has written and rewritten. As a photographer, this was visually very interesting for me because it reflected an ironic juxtaposition; messages from God on selflessness and kindness existing with the lady’s unanswered calls for help.

What did you find most tragic about the story?

The people of Meerut knew that there is this lady who roams the street and writes on walls for years. They treated it like a monotonous activity. Nobody cared or bothered to know more about what troubled her or rather did not want to take any responsibility for it. That is for me the most tragic part of the story.  

Every time I broached the topic of why nobody had tried to help her in the past in Meerut, people had a standard excuse—she didn’t want help herself or nothing seemed to work for her. My town’s mentality became evident; everyone was just so consumed in their lives they didn’t want to genuinely reach out to her. This, of course, represents in many ways the larger perspective of Indian society on mental health — it’s not looked upon like a disease that can be treated with counseling and medicine. The dominant belief remains that people just go mad.

How did the people of Meerut react to your photo series?

Thankfully, I never received any backlash. It was more positive feedback than I ever expected. I became sort of popular in town which made me really happy because that meant that finally people were addressing and talking about mental health, one way or another. So many people from Meerut, including friends, family, acquaintances and complete strangers reached out to me and appreciated my work. Though what was common in all these interactions was a sense of guilt in the locals, of having ignored a story of suffering in their own backyard.

I think why people reacted to my story in this way was also because of its digital reach. Suddenly it was in their newsfeeds and insta stories and as we are on our phones most of the day, people just could not ignore it anymore. For better or for worse at least in this way mental health was addressed and talked about. That was all that was needed.  

Do you continue to photograph Saxena’s writings?

The lady doesn’t write anymore. It’s been a few years since she has recovered and now is completely stable. But if you turn around a corner in Meerut, at times you will still find her writing. It tends to live on.

Child marriage remains a pressing global concern. In India, there are twenty-three million child brides, the highest number in the world, and while most Indian states have shown decline in incidence of child marriage in the last ten years, statistics from Rajasthan indicate that it continues to be on the rise there. National Family Health Survey (2015-16) data shows that 26.8% of girls in India are married before their 18th birthday; in Rajasthan, the percentage of such girls is 35%. Rajasthan’s state government has pledged  to make the state child-marriage free in the coming decade, but many of these young girls lack resources to leave marriages they were forced into.

Saarthi Trust was responsible for facilitating the first ever annulment of a child marriage in India in 2012. Started by Jodhpur-based rehabilitation psychologist, Dr. Kriti Bharti in 2011, the organization has subsequently been instrumental towards annulling 36 child marriages and preventing thousands from happening in Rajasthan. Recognizing that annulment of marriage was only part of the solution for the former child brides’ futures, Bharti established a rehabilitation program where the girls are given shelter, food, water, and counseling along with equipping them with educational and vocational skills to infuse their lives with new hope.

Bharti’s unwavering dedication towards fighting child marriage despite receiving death threats and encountering countless obstacles is shaped by her past, her faith, and her dream of “a society where all are free to fly in an open sky, unshackled from the handcuffs of exploitation and abuse.”

I spoke to her in Jodhpur to learn more about her journey.

How did you embark on this journey? What has made you so passionately involved?

I had a difficult childhood. My father abandoned me before my birth and my mother was under great  pressure from my relatives to abort me. I endured much verbal and physical abuse while growing up. When I was ten years old, I got poisoned and was bedridden for months; I recovered only due to Reiki therapy two years later. It was then I took my first revolutionary step in life by renouncing my surname and adopting Bharti instead: it means daughter of India, reflecting my disavowal of any caste or community.

I studied Psychology in college in Jodhpur, where we would offer counseling to different NGOs; I felt that I was meant for this life. I worked with various NGOs before starting Saarthi Trust in 2011.

I believe that the inner transformations which I experienced during childhood turned me from a victim into a survivor. I didn’t have someone to protect me then, I too needed a Kriti Bharti in my life. These children will, though, and as much as is possible, I will help them.

Could you tell me more about your fight against child marriage?

I fight abuse of any kind and in case of child marriage, it happens to encompass many pressing issues such as sexual abuse, child labor, education, and health.

While Rajasthan is known for its cultural heritage and beauty, the fact remains that it is one of the most backward states in India with many malpractices against women occurring there: child marriage, female feticide, sexual exploitation, and unequal educational opportunities. We are working to change the mindset wherever we go for there is a lot to be done. However, I take positives from the fact that the first child marriage annulment in India happened in Rajasthan too, hopefully becoming a catalyst  for other changes.

Do you think child marriage is on the decline? What role has government played in the situation? What do you think will really bring about change?

There has been no decline in child marriage. What I have seen on field and in government-recorded data are two entirely different things. Let’s say the administration receives information that a child marriage will be occurring somewhere; they will prevent it from happening along with counselling the parents, recording it that they did so. Yet, I have encountered many instances where the administration prevented the marriage from occurring but the ceremony nevertheless happened anyway few days later. Nowadays the families organizing the weddings have become very savvy: there are no photographers, no wedding invitations printed and very few people invited to the wedding. If you don’t have evidence that a wedding took place, how can you prove it? I feel that a strict follow up is required once the wedding has been stopped, the administration must vigilantly monitor the children involved until they turn 18 and 21 years old [legally permissible age for marriage in India].

There has been no decline in child marriage. What I have seen on field and in government-recorded data are two entirely different things.
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A child marriage happens when a girl-child is perceived as a burden in her family, believing she should be married off into another family and become their responsibility. One can’t attribute it to lack of education; I have seen it happening in educated families too. Those performing child marriages don’t want to leave behind tradition, they still would like to uphold it at any cost. The women involved say, it happened with us too and all was fine. A child bride once told her mother, “I experience pain in sexual activities, my husband beats me too,” and her mother responded, “you will have to endure it, like I did.” The mothers themselves don’t realize that what they experienced was abuse and exploitation. As it is, a girl grows up conditioned to living a life of restrictions and marriage subsequently becomes an extension of that of adjustment.

While the focus so far has been on stopping child-marriages, I believe that they are no less than a disease and I want to focus on a curative approach by eradicating them in the first place.

You have received so many death threats. Why are people so threatened? What keeps you going nonetheless?

Those who are threatened are those who promote child marriage at any cost: the families of the children involved, politicians, and community leaders. The grooms’ families are getting a daughter in law, the politicians are thinking of vote-banks and in the meantime, community leaders believe that they are the court, having the right to make decision for people’s lives. They also accrue financial benefits by allowing child marriages to take place. If family resists getting their daughter married and supports her, community-leaders threaten to ostracize and ask them to pay hefty fines up to 20 lakh rupees (US$ 29, 200). The families are often daily-wage earners, how will they raise such a huge amount?

As for what keeps me going on, given my past, I have seen life and death very closely; after all, I was close to death even before being born. I have also seen exploitation at close hand. That inner fear of death has gone having endured what I have. But those who threaten me do not realise the struggles I have experienced and how they have strengthened my resolve to fight child marriage. These death threats now no longer affect me; in fact, they have become a part of my life.

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What has been your biggest success? What has been your biggest challenge? Has there been a moment when you wanted to give up?

I am most happy when a child gets her marriage annulled. I see her being liberated from the shackles of an untimely bond and learning to see life as being full of golden opportunities instead.

Yes, there have been many times when I felt stuck; I need a lot of courage and optimism to see myself through those times and I derive it from my strong faith in God.

One of my most challenging times was when I rescued a girl, Sushila Bishnoi at 4am from the highway in Barmer district which is 300 km from Jodhpur in 2016. Sushila was twelve years old, wanting to get her marriage annulled. After acquiring her legal custody with great difficulty, the real challenge came about proving Sushila’s marriage. Her father was a criminal and knew how to circumvent the law; he declared that there had been no marriage, just talk of engagement. No villager in the meantime was willing to testify against the family in fear of violent retribution. How could I annul her marriage when there no marriage had supposedly taken in the first place?

I see her being liberated from the shackles of an untimely bond and learning to see life as being full of golden opportunities instead.
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The family threatened to kidnap me too amongst issuing other threats. I was wondering how to overcome the situation given that there was no evidence whatsoever to prove the marriage. It was then Facebook came to my rescue; I looked up Sushila’s husband and discovered he updated daily on Facebook. We sifted through seven years worth of updates to see if there were any incriminating pictures or comments which could help us prove the fact that he was married. We eventually collected evidence and presented it the to court. The annulment happened last year. Her family however refused to support Sushila and she has been with me since.

Laxmi Sargara was the first woman in India to annul her child marriage. What has been the impact?

We conduct orientation camps across Rajasthan raising awareness about why child marriages are bad. Lot of media coverage has helped too. We run a helpline to encourage anyone to report about the occurrence of a child marriage. No matter how dire their situation, the girls somehow contact me or someone else informs us.

In case of Laxmi, she was an 18 year old child-bride and did not want to go to her in laws’ home; she ran away from home and asked me for help to get out of the marriage. Divorce was a huge stigma for a woman in a rural set up and I wanted to find a permanent and alternate solution. Everyone told me that I was wasting my time, I should just get the brides divorced. However, I was clear about differentiating between divorce and cancellation of a marriage. I wanted to return to the girl her dignity and singlehood: she had never been married because what she had experienced was not a marriage. I researched extensively and learnt of the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act (2006), which allows child marriage to be nullified provided either of the individuals appeal to the court within two years of maturity. It was just that not many people knew about it and which we took avail of in Laxmi and others’ cases.

Only Laxmi has married again. The other girls are all focused on their careers, committed to being economically independent. They are not interested in marriage right now. They recognise that marriage is a part of life, not life itself.

I said two words — vagina and sex,” says Anshita Koul, “and everybody in my home town, including my family, was shocked.”

Koul was talking about her participation in Queens of Comedy, an India-based reality show for female comedians. “At least I have an equation with my family,” she adds. “There is always dialogue, even when it gets really awkward.”

On social media, though, it was made clear to her that she had crossed an invisible line by joking about her sexual frustrations in a long-distance relationship. Her largely Kashmiri audience on Instagram and YouTube was surprised and shocked to see her speak about her private life.

“There is no sex education in school,” she explains. “So talking about it is a big deal.”

Especially when women are doing the talking.

Female comedians being underrepresented and heavily content-policed is, of course, hardly limited to India. But there are some distinct circumstances in the country, including a censorship board that often influences what women can do onscreen–and who can make the jokes.

Movies in India need to be certified by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), which contributes to reduced female representation, particularly when a woman’s sexuality is not created for the male gaze. Most recently, we saw this with the banning of Lipstick Under My Burkha, a black comedy on sexuality and oppression, which was released to worldwide acclaim but was heavily delayed and censored in the country in which it was made.

In light of these regulations, the internet has become an important vehicle for female comedians to be heard, even when their humor falls outside the bounds of conventional acceptability. Because there are no official censorship guidelines for video-streaming websites, online platforms are finally bringing about a way to tell women’s stories that are not conceptualized and approved by men.

This lack of censorship is happening at a time when more people are accessing online video content than ever before. In the past two years, high-speed internet connections on smartphones have become affordable for a large section of the Indian population. In 2017, India had more than 300 millionsmartphone connections and over 80 million users for video-streaming applications. The market was valued at $280 million in December 2017.

This proliferation of smartphone usage has been a boon to women in particular, providing them the autonomy and privacy they often need to access boundary-pushing comedy online. And that comedy, in turn, is expanding at an exhilarating rate.

In December 2016, Amazon launched Prime Video in India and signed up 14 stand-up comedians to create original content for their platform. When a talk show host asked a panel of comedians about the complete absence of women in the line-up, the men suggested that it was simply a result of women not having one hour of content.

It was a while before the lone woman on the panel, Aditi Mittal, got an opportunity to speak. Mittal was later offered a stand-up special by Netflix, which she titled The Things They Wouldn’t Let Me Say. Her routine included sets on buying bras, street harassment, and breast cancer awareness.

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Mittal is among a growing cohort of Indian women connecting to an increasingly-online savvy audience. For her part, Queens of Comedy’s Koul has focused on changing the narrative of her hometown of Kashmir, which is largely only in the news as a contentious flash point between two nuclear neighbors — India and Pakistan. In her comedy, Koul talks about the region’s street food, Kashmiri slang, and most parents’ deep desire to turn their children into engineers. One of her more popular videos is a satire on the excessive attention given to a son-in-law when he visits his wife’s home.

Another groundbreaking comedian is Prajakta Koli, who runs a successful YouTube channel called “Mostlysane” with over 1.3 million subscribers. Koli creates content about dating, grooming, drinking, and college examinations.

Most of the material is simply a funny view of everyday life, but Koli comes out strongly in support of some causes. Last year, in June, she released a music video called “Shameless” that begins with the protagonist in the prison of body shaming. The song has been viewed over 3.5 million times.

A popular video by “Girlyapa,” meanwhile, offers a lighthearted take on periods in a country where menstruation is associated with a number of taboos. Conversations about periods are almost non-existent in most homes, and women are expected to hide their “condition” from the men in the family.

On International Women’s Day last year, Girlyapa also released a video about a girl telling her conservative mother that she isn’t a virgin. In the past year it has been viewed over 6 million times. Girlyapa’s video would have been deeply contentious if it had aired on television, or if the conversation had appeared as part of a mainstream movie.

Tellingly, major production houses are now starting to cash in on the action, too. The Y-films subsidiary of Yash Raj Films — one of the largest and most profitable Bollywood movie companies in India, which has made immensely popular movies propelled by female propriety and “family values” — recently released a comedy called “Ladies Room” online. The video features two female protagonists battling plumbing, pregnancy, policemen, landladies, bosses, and career changes in a series of six restrooms.

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And it’s not just unknown performers who are changing women’s comedy: Well-known celebrities are finally getting involved as well.

In July 2017, a short film written by Radhika Anand and Akanksha Seda and uploaded on YouTube featured three women who regularly appear in Bollywood movies. Titled Khaaney Mein Kya Hai (What’s for lunch?), the video uses the allegory of cooking to describe sex and desires. It has been viewed more than 6.7 million times in the past year.

Most significantly of all, this openness online has seemingly inspired more provocative content in mainstream Bollywood. In February of this year, Pad Man, inspired by a social activist who introduced low-cost sanitary pads to his Indian village, was released theatrically on Valentine’s Day, starring Bollywood A-lister Akshay Kumar. One of the promotional events was a campaign on social media where celebrities posed with a pad — an attempt to help people shed their awkwardness about menstruation.

These are all important steps forward, though as Koul is careful to point out, “Our conditioning is so deeply ingrained. It is not going to change overnight. But talking about it and being open to change are good beginnings.”

Meanwhile, female comedians push on. On Queens of Comedy, Koul and her fellow performers joke about about body hair, creepy attention on the street, religious stereotypes, unfair laws, body envy, sex-ed for suicide bombers, and more. Many of the episodes have quickly racked up half a million views on YouTube, including those with dark and controversial content.

Producers, Koul says, have informed her that the program may be censored on TV. But that won’t stop it from reaching a wider audience, for one simple reason: Online, the content will appear entirely unedited.

The Hate That Grows In Our Soil: Learning From India-Pakistan’s Partition

The tragedy in Charlottesville has forced me to confront a deep pain in my family’s history.

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By Nadya Agrawal

Mornings feel heavy recently. The air is full of humidity and rain is constantly on the edge of the horizon, yes, but it goes deeper than this climate, it’s in our soil.

In the past few weeks, we’ve witnessed the stark interplay of right and wrong, good and evil, inclusion and exclusion as white supremacists lashed out against anti-fascists and Black Lives Matter. Some died, many were hurt, and the neo-Nazis walked free. We, who watched from afar or who marched those streets, woke up that Sunday with hearts like stones and legs that could not move. It’s the stagnation of licking our wounds and of mourning our dead.

It’s the stagnation of licking our wounds and of mourning our dead.

The heaviness, an unnatural gravity that sank us into the ground rather than kept us upright upon it, followed into the next day. I woke up with a heart like a fist, my face already wet and pulled apart by a night of wrestling with dark demons. My muscles were stiff and tired. August 14 and 15 annually mark the Independence Days of Pakistan and India respectively. These are the days of self-determination, when a region, saturated with history and ancient in its presence, fought a global superpower and won. And these are the days immortalized by the warring of twin siblings who could not and would not live together.

When the British left, the fight was not over and a war that ended was renewed by people on both sides who killed their twins wantonly. Millions died. Millions more were displaced. Women were thrown into the fray and never seen again, their bodies sinking into an ocean of chaos.

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My grandfather was a child at the time, a Hindu child born on the wrong side of the border. His family, including his older sister whose eyes had grown wide with her new teenage understanding, packed up their house in Rawalpindi, hugged their Muslim friends and servants goodbye, these people who had raised them, and left for a new home. My grandfather did not know what he saw, but his sister did. In that migration she was witness to untold horrors, protected only by her own quick feet and parents who hurried her along.

I knew my great-grandmother briefly, an impressive and small woman who crossed that border and made a new life for her children in a new city. She helped raise my mother. And yet with the history of Partition so ingrained in my blood and so close I could touch it, I have never in my 26 years heard anyone in my family talk of it freely. Instead the trauma of that time was diluted down into vitriol against the estranged sibling Pakistan or channeled into the world’s distrust of Muslims. Pain and hate were reborn as fury and hate. The hate never went away.

Mourning The Forgotten Women Of India’s Violent Partition

Muslims were not our enemies. Sikhs and Hindus were not the enemies of Muslims. The tribal violence that existed was stoked and set ablaze by the British who wanted to conquer us and to own us fully, no matter if we were ashes or people. But the hatred that arose in the absence of the British was not directed at the source of violence, the overlords who raped the region of its resources and left tens of millions to starve, it was directed at Pakistan, and from Pakistan back at India. Missiles on the border point both ways, mutual assured annihilation. Hate is deep in the soil of this world.

In my family we do not talk about Partition. We do not talk about trauma or pain after something has happened. In India it is the same — we leave history where it sits in the annals of time. We do not dredge it up and interrogate it, like it’s a guest over for tea. We pretend it doesn’t exist. But that is not how you free yourself from pain — you cannot leave a knife sticking out of your side for 70 years and hope it will just dissolve.

We cannot leave the symbols of our past, statues commemorating generals who fought to protect the enslavement of black people and the genocide of indigenous people, erect in public spaces.

We cannot leave the symbols of our past, statues commemorating generals who fought to protect the enslavement of black people and the genocide of indigenous people, erect in public spaces. These are not the glorious days of our past, these are its darkest days we are forcing people to celebrate. We must invite this pain to tea. We must interrogate what it means to leave these symbols intact to embolden a new generation of hateful, bitter white people.

White supremacists are not a new species. Their hate is not unique. Their hate is from the same well that waters the whole world, but we can do more than to relegate them to the history books. They are the real, modern manifestation of this country’s trauma and we must deal with them head on.

This story originally appeared on Kajal Magazine. Republished here with permission.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/can-this-indian-detergent-ad-change-the-way-we-talk-about-gender-equity-896d0ea4f5d5/ Wed, 24 Feb 2016 17:16:35 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=9014 Read more]]> “My little baby girl, she’s grown up so much. She used to play ‘house’ and now she manages a household. Manages an office. I’m so proud . . . and I’m so sorry.”

By Ruchika Tulshyan

Growing up in a South Asian household in Singapore, I never saw my father get up to grab his own glass of water. It was my mother’s “job” to serve him. He would always eat dinner first, and then when he was done, my mother would sit down for her meal. My father would proudly proclaim that he had no idea where anything was in the kitchen, and that he couldn’t even boil an egg. I observed this same dynamic, time and again, in the homes of my friends and other family members.

Nearly three decades later, not much has changed. Still today, across most South Asian households, housework is almost always considered a woman’s work. A recent Nielsen India survey found that 76% of Indian men believe laundry is a woman’s job, and 68% would prefer to watch TV over doing the laundry.

I considered myself a feminist as a child, and have lived independently in various parts of the Western world. But the inequity I saw as a child left an indelible imprint in my mind about gender roles.

When I first got married, I was on autopilot when I made dinner and insisted that my husband eat his meal before me.

“What are you doing? Why aren’t we eating together?” he asked, shocked.

I didn’t have an answer. I was stunned as I watched him help me chop, wash, and clean up. During one early visit, my mother-in-law stopped me as I warmed up rice from the day before for myself to eat, while the men ate the fresh rice we’d made that day. “Are you not human?” she asked. “Why do women have to eat old food while men don’t?” I didn’t have an answer then, either. I just assumed this was culturally acceptable behavior among South Asian couples like us.

A recent Nielsen India survey found that 76% of Indian men believe laundry is a woman’s job, and 68% would prefer to watch TV over doing the laundry.
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That was four years ago — and it’s taken me the entire time since then to undo the messages I learned about gender roles growing up.

All of which may explain why I openly cry every time I watch this new viral advertisement from the Indian detergent company Ariel.

In the video, a father watches his adult daughter return home after a day at the office, cleaning up after her child and making tea for her husband who is watching TV, all while talking on the phone about emailing a presentation (presumably to someone at work).

The father narrates (translation from Hindi is mine):

He goes on to apologize for never telling her that housework is both a man’s job and a woman’s job. But how could he, he laments, when he never helped her mother with housework?

“What you saw, is what you learned. Your husband must have seen the same thing growing up . . . from every dad who set the wrong example, I’m sorry.”

He vows to make a change, and the commercial ends on an encouraging note — no subtitles necessary.

Do I think a commercial that sells laundry detergent can change the world? I’m not that naïve. P&G, the behemoth that owns the Ariel brand, likely knew this commercial — complete with the hashtag #ShareTheLoad — would go viral among the millennial, social-media-savvy crowd in India. And they were correct.

But I do believe this Ariel advert successfully captures a reality faced not just in India, but all over the world. Women spend at least twice as much time as men on unpaid work, like housework and caregiving, that take up long hours and are low reward. And women are shouldering the lion’s share of household work and caregiving even if they also hold down full-time paid jobs.

In every region of the world, women do less paid work than men, with an especially pronounced disparity in South Asia:

(Image is a screen grab from the 2016 Gates Annual Letter)

In India, the inequity is especially acute. Between 2005 and 2011, India’s economy grew 7% on average, but the number of women in its labor force fell from 31 to 24%. Women in India are becoming more educated and the birth rate is actually falling among these women, but still, India is the 11th worst country in the world when it comes to women in the workforce.

Of course, the social cost of this is enormous.

Women spend at least twice as much time as men on unpaid work, like housework and caregiving, that take up long hours and are low reward.
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“Working, and the control of assets it allows, lowers rates of domestic violence and increases women’s decision-making in the household. And an economy where all the most able citizens can enter the labor force is more efficient and grows faster,” Rohini Pande, professor of public policy at Harvard University, wrote in a New York Times op-ed. Pervasive gender norms, and the idea that a woman’s work is at home, continues to keep women oppressed in a variety of ways. According to the United Nations Development Program, India ranks 130 out of 155 countries in the Gender Inequality Index, behind neighbors Bangladesh and Pakistan.

The Ariel commercial reveals a truth sometimes lost in the debate about workforce equality: If women are empowered to work but also expected to do all the housework and caregiving, we’re not really moving women’s rights forward. We’re just adding the pressure of full-time paid work on top of the burden of unpaid work. To achieve real equity, the solution isn’t simply to bring more women into the workplace; it’s also to get more men to share in housework.

Among developing countries, the unequal burden of this work hampers the livelihoods of girls and women for generations to come. In her annual letter published this week, Melinda Gates writes that globally, women average 4.5 hours daily doing unpaid work. Men spend less than half that. “But the fact is that the burden of unpaid work falls heaviest on women in poor countries, where the hours are longer and the gap between women and men is wider. In India, to take one example, women spend about 6 hours, and men spend less than 1 hour,” she writes. At the end of her letter, Gates emphasizes the importance of sharing unpaid work among the sexes.

One tear-jerking commercial and one impassioned letter does not a revolution make. But it can change a few minds.

If these messages were pervasive when I was a little girl, maybe it would be me demanding equality in my home, rather than leaving it up to chance to find a partner who believed in sharing the load. Or better yet, maybe I would never need to demand such equality in the first place.