Women's Day or Working Women's Day?

The Statesman decided to celebrate International Women's Day on March 8 this year by running a review of my novel, Where Mayflies Live Forever. Of course, I was pleased to see the book reviewed with enthusiasm and feeling, but it led me to think about what this day means to all of us today.

International Women's Day didn't start as a day for flowers and brunch — it was born in the gritty heart of the labour movement, when women workers in the early 1900s hit the streets demanding fair pay, decent hours, and the basic right to be treated like human beings at work. The "working" in Working Women's Day was always the point, and honestly, it still is.

Over a century later, if you look at what's happening on the ground in India, you'll see exactly why this day hasn't lost its bite. From the bidi rollers of Bihar to the garment workers of Tiruppur to the anganwadi and ASHA workers who held the country's healthcare system together through a pandemic, Indian women have always been at the backbone of the economy — just rarely at the front of the pay cheque. The gender pay gap in India remains among the steeper ones globally, and a huge chunk of women's work — farming, caregiving, cooking, cleaning — simply doesn't show up in any official accounting of the nation's wealth. Women working inside the home are marginalized even more than those working in public spaces: their labour is so invisible that Indian High Courts have only recently begun to recognize that homemaking is not unskilled labour and must be accorded a proper value.

The promises made to women entering the formal workforce are often undercut by the reality of being passed over for promotions, nudged toward "safer" roles, or expected to quietly disappear after marriage or motherhood. Even in India's booming startup and tech scene, women founders receive a fraction of the venture funding that their male peers do, and the numbers in boardrooms and leadership positions remain embarrassingly low. Self-help groups, women-led cooperatives, and movements like those among Kudumbashree workers in Kerala show what's possible when women's economic power is genuinely backed — but these remain islands of empowerment, not the norm.

Calling it Working Women's Day, then, is a way of keeping the conversation honest — because wrapping it in pink and calling it a celebration risks becoming a distraction from the work that actually still needs doing. As long as an ASHA worker has to protest on the street for a regular salary, or a domestic worker in Delhi has no contract and no recourse, this day remains less a celebration and more a reminder.

x----x----x

p.s. The two photos attached to this post are instructive: the first [source] was taken in 1977 and is of Jayaben Desai, who "walked out of London's Grunwick film processing plant when a colleague was sacked, in protest at the poor treatment of immigrant workers. More than 100 of her fellow employees would follow. Desai, who picketed for a year, famously told her manager that she and her fellow strikers were "lions." While the strike was not successful, the dispute's cause became of interest to the trade union movement at large, and even the [British] prime minister himself." The second photo [source] is a famous still from Satyajit Ray's quietly powerful film Mahanagar (The Big City, 1963) where the protagonist Arati, who fights her Bengali middle-class family's and society's prejudice against working women to land a job and become successful at it, resigns from that much-coveted position because she could not look past her male boss's prejudicial mistreatment of her colleague, the Anglo-Indian Edith. Jayaben was a real woman and Arati a fictional character: but put them side-by-side and you have a powerful image of why a day, any day in the year, can be celebrated as working women's day as long as working women have access to safety, equal opportunity, and equal pay.