Fast-changing women and not-so-quick men

As women evolve with the times, men ought to prepare themselves for changes too. While girls/women are seen adapting deftly to an ever-evolving world, boys/men seem to be lagging behind.

For at least two generations now, we have raised our girls to be confident & to fight for their rights. However, we seem to have ignored an entire generation of boys who were not told anything about how their sisters were changing. While we gave our daughters new ideals & role models, no one bothered to tell their brothers that they ought to follow suit too!

Riding two-wheelers & driving cars, for example, has become an essential life skill for women today. You can often hear dads proudly proclaiming that their daughters can drive very well indeed & they don’t need a father/husband/brother to take them anywhere anymore.

Boys in a significant number of families, on the other hand, were never taught that cooking is an essential life skill. You don’t see many parents proudly saying that their son can cook & doesn’t need a mother/wife/sister to feed him & keep him alive!

We don’t tell our sons that it is okay for them to be paid less than their wives or stay at home to take care of the kids while their spouses continue to work.

Most men want to marry a working woman (in theory) but are completely unprepared for the practical reality of a marriage where both partners work. It means doing the dishes or supervising the maid when your wife has a report to complete. It means taking half the day off to take care of your sick child because your wife has an important presentation. It may even mean giving up a promotion or moving to a new city for your spouse’s career.

We are still raising our boys the way we did, for the last many generations. Because we don’t tell our sons all this, they continue to expect that their wife will automatically give up the job/promotion/transfer in favour of the family whereas they will never have to take a step back from what matters to them, in their own careers / life.

While metros are witnessing better-balanced scales and equally distributed roles, there is a whole male generation in rural and semi-urban India that needs to catch up with the times. Women are expected to assume dinner, the house, kids, in-laws & maid as their responsibility, even if they're getting a bigger pay check home, while the men don’t know what they did wrong. After all, they ‘allow’ their wives to work, what more do they want?

Let us not only empower women, but also prepare men to set their expectations right.

Let us not only celebrate women leading organisations but also men leading at their home fronts.

Gender, is no more defined by what one does; it should never have.