Tag: patriarchy

Tech solutions to household labour are also problems

Just to be clear, the term ‘family’ in this post refers to a cis-het nuclear family unit.

Tanvi Deshpande writing for Indiaspend, June 12, 2022:

The Union government’s ambitious Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) aims to provide tap water to every household in rural India by 2024. Until now, 50% of households have a tap connection, an improvement from August 2019, when the scheme started and 17% of households had a tap connection. The mission’s dashboard shows that in Take Deogao Gram Panchayat that represents Bardechi Wadi, only 32% of the households have tap connections. Of these, not a single one has been provided to Pardhi’s hamlet.

This meant, for around five months every summer, women and children would rappel down a 60-foot well and spend hours waiting for water to seep into the bottom. In India, filling water for use at home is largely a woman’s job. Globally, women and girls spend 200 million hours every day collecting water, and in Asia, one round trip to collect water takes 21 minutes, on average, in rural areas.

The water pipeline has freed up time for Bardechi Wadi’s women and children but patriarchal norms, lack of a high school in the village and of other opportunities for development means that these free hours have just turned into more time for household chores, our reporting found.

Now these women don’t face the risk of death while fetching water but, as Deshpande has written, the time and trouble that the water pipeline has saved them will now be occupied by new chores and other forms of labour. There may have been a time when the latter might have seemed like the lesser of those two evils, but it is long gone. Today, in the climate crisis era – which often manifests as killer heatwaves in arid regions that are already short on water – the problem is access to leisure, to cooling and to financial safeguards. When women are expected to do more chores because they have the time, they lose access to leisure, which is important at least to cool off, but better yet because it is a right per se (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 24).

This story is reminiscent of the effects of the introduction of home appliances into the commercial market. I read a book about a decade ago that documented, among other things, how the average amount of time women (in the US) spent doing household chores hadn’t changed much between the 1920s and the 2000s, even though it coincided wholly with the second industrial revolution. This was because – as in the case of the pipeline of Bardechi Wadi – the purchase and use of these devices freed up women’s time for even more chores. We need the appliances as much as we need the pipeline, just that men should also do household chores. However, the appliances also presented and present more problems than those that pertain to society’s attitudes towards how women should spend their time.

1. Higher expectations – With the availability of household appliances (like the iron box, refrigerator, washing machine, dish washer, oven, etc.), the standards for various chores shot up as did what we considered to be comfortable living – but what we expected of women didn’t change. So suddenly the women of the house were also responsible for ensuring that the men’s shirts and pants were all the more crinkle-less, that food was served fresh and hot all the time, etc. as well as to enliven family life by inventing/recreating food recipes, serving and cleaning up, etc.

2. Work + chores – The introduction of more, and more diverse, appliances into the market, aspirations and class mobility together paralleled an increase in women’s labour-force participation through the 20th century. But before these women left for their jobs and after they got home, they still had to household chores as well – including cooking and packing lunch for themselves and for their husbands and/or children, doing the laundry, shopping for groceries, etc.

3. Think about the family – The advent of tech appliances also foisted on women two closely related responsibilities: to ensure the devices worked as intended and to ensure they fit with the family-unit’s ideals and aspirations. As Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite wrote in 2016: “The automatic processes of programming the coffeemaker, unlocking an iPad with a fingerprint, or even turning on the light when you get home are the result of years of marketing that create a household problem (your home is too dark, your family too far-flung, your food insufficiently inventive), solves it with a new product, and leaves women to clean up the mess when the technology fails to deliver on its promises”.

In effect, through the 20th century, industrialisation happened in two separate ways within the household and without. To use writer Ellen Goodman’s evocative words from a 1983 article: “At the beginning of American history …, most chores of daily life were shared by men and women. To make a meal, men chopped the wood, women cooked the stew. One by one, men’s tasks were industrialized outside the home, while women’s stayed inside. Men stopped chopping wood, but women kept cooking.”

The diversity of responsibilities imposed by household appliances exacts its own cost. A necessary condition of men’s help around the house is that they – we – must also constantly think about which task to perform and when, instead of expecting to be told what to do every time. This is because, by expecting periodic reminders, we are still forcing women to retain the cognitive burden associated with each chore. If you think you’re still helping by sharing everything except the cognitive burden, you’re wrong. Shifting between tasks affects one’s ability to focus, performance and accuracy and increases forgetfulness. Psychologists call this the switch cost.

It is less clear to me than it may be to others as to the different ways in which the new water pipeline through Bardechi Wadi will change the lives of the women there. But without the men of the village changing how they think about their women and their ‘responsibilities to the house’, we can’t expect anything meaningful. At the same time, the effects of the climate crisis will keep inflating the price these women pay in terms of their psychological, physical and sexual health and agency.

Bharat Biotech gets 1/10 for tweet

If I had been Bharat Biotech’s teacher and “Where is your data?” had been an examination question, Bharat Biotech would have received 1 out of 10 marks.

The correct answer to where is your data can take one of two forms: either an update in the form of where the data is in the data-processing pipeline or to actually produce the data. The latter in fact would have deserved a bonus point, if only because the question wasn’t precise enough. The question should really have been a demand – “Submit your data” – instead of allowing the answerer, in its current form, to get away with simply stating where the data currently rests. Bharat Biotech gets 1/10 because it does neither; the 1 is for correct spelling.

In fact, the company’s chest-thumping based on publishing nine papers in 12 months is symptomatic of a larger problem with the student. He fails to understand that only data is data, and that the demand for data is a demand for data per se. It ought not to be confused with a demand for authority. Data accords authority in an object-oriented and democratic sense. With data, everyone else can see for themselves – whether by themselves or through the mouths and minds of independent experts they trust – if the student’s claims hold up. And if they do, they confer the object of the data, the COVID-19 vaccine named Covaxin, with attributes like reliability.

(Why ‘he’? The patriarchal conditions in and with which science has operated around the world, but especially in Europe and the US, in the last century or so have diffused into scientific practice itself, in terms of how the people at large have constituted – as well as have been expected to constitute, by the scientific community – scientific authority, expertise’s immunity to criticism and ownership of knowledge production and dissemination apparatuses, typically through “discrimination, socialisation and the gender division of labour”. Irrespective of the means – although both from the company’s and the government’s sides, very few women have fielded and responded to questions about drug/vaccine approvals – we already see these features in the manner in which ‘conventional’ scientific journals have sought to retain their place in the international knowledge production economy, and their tendency to resort to arguments that they serve an important role in it even as they push for anti-transparent practices, from the scientific papers’ contents to details about why they charge so much money.)

However, the student has confused authority of this kind with authority of a kind we more commonly associate with the conventional scientific publishing paradigm: in which journals are gatekeepers of scientific knowledge – both in terms of what topics they ‘accept’ manuscripts on and what they consider to be ‘good’ results; and in which a paper, once published, is placed behind a steeply priced paywall that keeps both knowledge of the paper’s contents and the terms of its ‘acceptance’ by the journal beyond public scrutiny – even when public money funded the research described therein. As such, his insistence that we be okay with his having published nine papers in 12 months is really his insistence that we vest our faith in scientific journals, and by extension their vaunted decision to ‘approve of’ his work. This confusion on his part is also reflected in what he offers as his explanation for the absence of data in the public domain, but which are really his excuses.

Our scientific commitment as a company stands firm with data generation, data transparency and peer-reviewed publications.

Sharing your data in a secluded channel with government bodies is not data transparency. That’s what the student needs for regulatory approval. Transparency applies when the data is available for everyone else to independently access, understand and check.

Phase 3 final analysis data will be available soon. Final analysis requires efficacy and 2 months safety follow-up data on all subjects. This is mandated by CDSCO and USFDA. Final analysis will first be submitted to CDSCO, followed by submissions to peer reviewed journals and media dissemination.

What is required by CDSCO does not matter to those allowing Bharat Biotech’s vaccines into the bloodstreams, and in fact every Indian on whom the student has inflicted this pseudo-choice. And at this point to invoke what the USFDA requires can only lead to a joke: studies of the vaccines involved in the formal vaccination drive have already been published in the US; even studies of new vaccines as well as follow-ups of existing formulations are being placed in the public domain through preprint papers that describe the data from soup to nuts. All we got from the student vis-à-vis Covaxin this year was interim phase 3 trial data in early March, announced through a press release, and devoid even of error bars for its most salient claims.

So even for an imprecisely worded question, it has done well to elicit a telling answer from the student: that the data does not exist, and the student believes he is too good for us all.

Thanks to Jahnavi Sen for reading the article before it was published.

The chrysalis that isn’t there

I wrote the following post while listening to this track. Perhaps you will enjoy reading it to the same sounds. Otherwise, please consider it a whimsical recommendation. 🙂

I should really start keeping a log of different stories in the news all of which point to the little-acknowledged but only-evident fact that science – like so many things, including people – does not embody lofty ideals as much as the aspirations to those ideals. Nature News reported on January 31 that “a language analysis of titles and abstracts in more than 100,000 scientific articles,” published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), had “found that papers with first and last authors who were both women were about 12% less likely than male-authored papers to include sensationalistic terms such as ‘unprecedented’, ‘novel’, ‘excellent’ or ‘remarkable’;” further, “The articles in each comparison were presumably of similar quality, but those with positive words in the title or abstract garnered 9% more citations overall.” The scientific literature, people!

Science is only as good as its exponents, and there is neither meaning nor advantage to assuming that there is such a thing as a science beyond, outside of and without these people. Doing so inflates science’s importance when it doesn’t deserve to be, and suppresses its shortcomings and prevents them from being addressed. For example, the BMJ study prima facie points to gender discrimination but it also describes a scientific literature that you will never find out is skewed, and therefore unrepresentative of reality, unless you acknowledge that it is constituted by papers authored by people of two genders, on a planet where one gender has maintained a social hegemony for millennia – much like you will never know Earth has an axis of rotation unless you are able to see its continents or make sense of its weather.

The scientific method describes a popular way to design experiments whose performance scientists can use to elucidate refined, and refinable, answers to increasingly complex questions. However, the method is an external object (of human construction) that only, and arguably asymptotically, mediates the relationship between the question and the answer. Everything that comes before the question and after the answer is mediated by a human consciousness undeniably shaped by social, cultural, economic and mental forces.

Even the industry that we associate with modern science – composed of people who trained to be scientists over at least 15 years of education, then went on to instruct and/or study in research institutes, universities and laboratories, being required to teach a fixed number of classes, publish a minimum number of papers and accrue citations, and/or produce X graduate students, while drafting proposals and applying for grants, participating in workshops and conferences, editing journals, possibly administering scientific work and consulting on policy – is steeped in human needs and aspirations, and is even designed to make room for them, but many of us non-scientists are frequently and successfully tempted to address the act of being a scientist as an act of transformation: characterised by an instant in time when a person changes into something else, a higher creature of sorts, like a larva enters a magical chrysalis and exits a butterfly.

But for a man to become a scientist has never meant the shedding of his identity or social stature; ultimately, to become a scientist is to terminate at some quasi-arbitrary moment the slow inculcation of well-founded knowledge crafted to serve a profitable industry. There is a science we know as simply the moment of discovery: it is the less problematic of the two kinds. The other, in the 21st century, is also funding, networking, negotiating, lobbying, travelling, fighting, communicating, introspecting and, inescapably, some suffering. Otherwise, scientific knowledge – one of the ultimate products of the modern scientific enterprise – wouldn’t be as well-organised, accessible and uplifting as it is today.

But it would be silly to think that in the process of constructing this world-machine of sorts, we baked in the best of us, locked out the worst of us, and threw the key away. Instead, like all human endeavour, science evolves with us. While it may from time to time present opportunities to realise one or two ideals, it remains for the most part a deep and truthful reflection of ourselves. This assertion isn’t morally polarised, however; as they say, it is what it is – and this is precisely why we must acknowledge failures in the practice of science instead of sweeping them under the rug.

One male scientist choosing more uninhibitedly to call his observation “unprecedented” than a female scientist might have been encouraged, among other things, by the peculiarities of a gendered scientific labour force and scientific enterprise, but many male scientists indulging just as freely in their evaluatory fantasies, such as they are, indicates a systemic corruption that transcends (but not escapes) science. The same goes for, as in another recent example, for the view that science is self-correcting. It is not because people are not, and they need to be pushed to be. In March 2019, for example, researchers uncovered at least 58 papers published in a six-week period whose authors had switched their desired outcomes between the start and end of their respective experiments to report positive, and to avoid reporting negative, results. When the researchers wrote to the authors as well as the editors of the journals that had published the problem papers, most of them denied there was an issue and refused to accept modifications.

Again, the scientific literature, people!

What’s common to #yesallwomen, scripta manent, good journalism and poka-yoke?

Featured image credit: renaissancechambara/Flickr, CC BY 2.0.

I’m a big fan of poka-yoke (“po-kuh yo-kay”), a Japanese quality control technique founded on a simple principle: if you don’t want mistakes to happen, don’t allow opportunities for them to happen. It’s evidently dictatorial and not fit for use with most human things, but it is quite useful when performing simple tasks, for setting up routines and, of course, when writing (i.e. “If you don’t want the reader to misinterpret a sentence, don’t give her an opportunity to misinterpret it”). However, I do wish something poka-yoke-ish was done with the concept of good journalism.

The industry of journalism is hinged on handling information and knowledge responsibly. While Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution protects every Indian citizen’s right to free speech (even if multiple amendments since 1951 have affected its conditionality), good journalists can’t – at least ought not to – get away with making dubious or easily falsifiable claims. Journalism, in one sense, is free speech plus a solid dose of poka-yoke that doesn’t allow its practitioners to be stupid or endorse stupidity, at least of the obvious kind. It must not indulge in the dissemination of doltishness irrespective of Article 19(1)(a)’s safeguarding of the expression of it. While John/Jane Doe can say silly things, a journalist must at least qualify them as such while discussing them.

Not doing that would be to fall prey to false balance: to assume that, in the pursuit of objectivity, one is presenting the Other Side of a debate that has, in fact, become outmoded. With that established: On January 5, The Quint published an opinion piece titled ‘Bengaluru Shame: You Can Choose to Be Safe, So Don’t Blame the Mob’. It was with reference to rampant molestation on the streets of Bengaluru of women on the night of December 31 despite the presence of the police. Its author first writes,

Being out on the streets exposes one to anti-social elements, like a mob. A mob is the most insensitive group of people imaginable and breeds unruly behaviour. As responsibilities are distributed within the group, accountability vanishes and inhibitions are shed.

… and then,

When you step out onto the street, you are fraught with an incumbent risk. You may meet with an accident. That’s why there are footpaths and zebra crossings. You may slip on the road if it is wet! Will you then blame the road because it is wet? This is the point I’m making: Precautions and rights are different things. I have a right to be on the roads. And I can also take the precaution to walk sensibly and not run in front of the oncoming traffic.

Because traffic and the mob are the same, yes? The author’s point is that the women who were molested should have known that there was going to be an unruly mob on the streets at some point and that the women – and not the mob or the police – should have taken precautions to, you know, avoid a molestation. The article brings to mind the uncomfortable Rowan Atkinson skit ‘Fatal Beatings’, where the voice of authority is so self-righteous that the humour is almost slapstick.

The article’s publication promptly revived the silly #notallmen trend on Twitter, admirably and effectively panned by many (of the people I follow, at least; if you aren’t yet on the #yesallwomen side, this by Annie Zaidi might change your mind). But my bigger problem was with a caveat that appeared atop the article on The Quint some time later. Here it is:

It has been brought to our attention by readers that the following “endorses” opinions that The Quint should not be carrying. While we understand your sentiments, and wish to reiterate that our own editorial stand is at complete variance with the views in this blog, … we also believe that we have a duty of care towards a full body of readers, some among whom may have very different points of view than ours. Since The Quint is an open, liberal platform, which believes in healthy debate among a rainbow of opinions (which saves us from becoming an echo chamber that is the exact opposite of an open, liberal platform), we do allow individual bloggers to publish their pieces. We would be happy to publish your criticism or opposition to any piece that is published on The Quint. Come and create a lively, intelligent, even confrontational, conversation with us. Even if we do not agree with a contributor’s view, we cannot not defend her right to express it.

(Emphasis added.) Does The Quint want us to celebrate its publishing opinions contrary to its own, or to highlight the possibility that The Quint isn’t really paying attention to the opinions it holds, or to notice that it is irresponsibly publishing opinions that don’t deserve an audience of thousands? It’s baffling.

Look at the language: “Lively” is fine, as is “confrontational” – but the editors may have tripped up in their parsing of the meaning of ‘intelligent’. They are indeed right to invite an intelligent conversation but the intent should have been accompanied by an ability to distinguish between intelligence and whatever else; without this, it’s simply a case of a misleading advertisement. Moreover, I’m also irked by their persistence with the misguided caveat, which, upon rereading, reinforces a wrong message. I’m reminded here of the German existentialist Franz Rosenzweig’s thoughts on the persistence of the written word, excerpted from a biography titled Franz Rosenzweig and Jehuda Halevi: Translating, Translations, and Translators:

Permanence depends more upon whether a word reaches reception or not, and less upon whether it is spoken or written. But the written word, because captured in a visible physicality, does offer a type of permanence that is denied to the spoken word. The written word can be read by those outside the “intimacy” of two speakers, such as letter writers; or of the “one-way intimacy” that arises between one speaker, such as the bookwriter and many readers. The permanence inherent in the written word is framed within boldness and daring on the part of the speaker: translated or not, there is a thereness to the written word, and this thereness is conducive to replay for the hearer through rereading.

TL;DR: Verba volant, scripta manent.

The Quint article was ‘engaged with’ at least 10,300-times at the time this post was written. Every time it was read, there will have been a (darkly) healthy chance of convincing a reader to abdicate from the decidedly anti-patriarchic #yesallwomen camp and move to the dispassionate and insensitive #notallmen camp. A professing of intelligence without continuous practice will every now and then legitimise immature thinking; a good example of one such trip-up is false balance. This post itself was pretty easy to write because it used to happen oh-so-regularly with climate change (and less regularly now): in both cases today, there is an Other Side – but it is not in denying climate change or refuting #yesallwomen but, for example, debating what the best measure could be to mitigate their adverse consequences.