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Do you really need women-empowerment conversations in a city? I thought this is only for the villages.

Before we talk about that, I want to take sometime to explain my journey to realise this.

Chapter 1: Introduction

I am Nitya. I am a city girl. We are a family of 6. I have an elder sister. My parents really wanted a boy when I was born, so, I have twin younger brothers. I am from a middle-class family, since my dad is an honest IPS Officer. We did not enjoy luxurious dinners at restaurants or fancy toys, but my parents did invest on good schools.

My mom is a strong woman, and unlike other ladies in my extended family – she has an opinion and she will ensure that her opinion is heard. I respect this about her. (notice when I use strong for woman – it means mentally strong, but for a man this usually represents physically strong, small gender differences apply in our daily dialogue too).

I have been fortunate to have a gender-neutral upbringing. The four kids got the same privileges (we all got money on rakhi), punishments(more like empty threats) and same restrictions applied to all of us. I used the privileges a little more, since I had a bigger friend circle as a kid – so my parties, night-stays were more frequent than other three.

Chapter 2: Becoming a woman

When you turn into teenage girl, you suddenly start to get attention from boys. Same happened with me, being a girl becomes the best thing in the world, since social acceptance is all you care about in the world then.

That is also the time when you get molested physically and emotionally, because you are becoming a woman, and you don’t know how to deal with it and protect yourself. This happens to every girl I have talked to. I don’t even recall how many times this has happened – hell, I was groped because I tried to help a person find a house in my society. I don’t remember being in a packed area and not having someone touch my ass – this is all when I was still a kid.

Unfortunately, I learned this the hard way on how to deal with people in public places and how to not get groped, or, how to handle your teenage boyfriend who wants more than a kiss and holding hands. Women become emotionally mature very early because they are dealing with all this from a very young age.

Till this time, apart from being groped by men, gender difference had not impacted my life in any way. I was good in studies, among the top kids in Chandigarh – I got constant motivation from my teachers and parents. I had a good friend circle at school. Don’t think life could get better than that. I had everything, I was super-confident that I could achieve everything.

Then, came college.

I studied Comp. Science from IIIT Hyd. College. Life was great with two differences-

• Girls suddenly reduced to just 15% of the batch. We were just 23 girls in a batch of 160 students.
• Professors were male. I was used to almost-all female teachers throughout school.

There were no differences like night-time restrictions, mess restrictions based on gender in my college – yey. And, because of the skewed gender-ratio, there was a problem of plenty, for women and men had to try harder to be in a relationship.

The men in my college were good men, but you always have a few bad apples in the tree. Unfortunately, one of those bad apples happened to be a former friend of mine, who hacked into women’s computers including mine and turned on our video camera, when we were not noticing and recorded our footage in his computer. Our college took appropriate action promptly. But, this was my first lesson in violation of trust, and I promised myself I will do better in choosing the people I allow into my life.

I truly believed that except for our biological differences and initial dating game – everyone in my college was equal, since we have same education + same age. To be honest, I believed gender difference was a little in favour of women and that women in my college are a little superior. Topper of my batch was a girl, we had strong women reps in our college committees.

The world was a good place for educated women, but then I started working.

Chapter 3: Realisation of my internal bias towards women

I joined Flipkart as a fresher, and the minute you start working, you are suddenly supposed to be a grown up. I was paying my taxes, buying a car, paying salaries to the help. And, this is when I interacted with people for the first time outside my circle – I got a sense of the real world.

I was one of the first members in iOS team. So, I did get a level of respect from my team. Things were good since I didn’t really feel any gender difference – I was maybe one of the boys.

One year later, a senior female colleague joined. This is when I began noticing some difference. I could see that there were always pushback from people to her opinion on code changes, and somehow she was considered aggressive, needless to say, she did not make friends here. I also felt the same way about her that time. I did not know there was a bias in me as well towards women who speak up more.

When she joined, I found myself unexpectedly feeling competitive with my new female colleague – a sensation I never experienced when a male colleague joined. I realise now, that because there are so less women in tech, I had subconsciously created a feeling in my mind that there are limited opportunities for women – which is not the case.

This resulted in a me vs her feeling without any fault of hers and she did not even know she is suddenly in a race against me. So, ashamed to say – but I wasn’t very nice to her initially. Unaware of the struggles she may already be dealing with as a woman in tech and when she asked me if I wanted to join Women@FK, I remember answering like this – what do women in cities who have such good jobs and working in tier1 companies have to complain about?

I hated the word ‘feminist’ – the word to me meant ‘men-hating’ souls. So, I never really called myself that. Plus the word does not portray equality – it somehow portrays women powering men. So, basically, I tried to avoid groups, people who associated themselves with the word. I also thought identifying yourself as a woman at workplace is a sign of weakness and asking for attention. I was wrong.

Because I was not aware of the bias I held towards women, I failed to provide the support I should have then. She is now my friend and I deeply respect her. But I feel as women, we need to shift our perspective and stop thinking of other women as competition but more as we are together.

Anyway, things were about to change when I was about to realise the bias towards women firsthand.

I had bought my car by then, and one day when I was dropping off a male colleague back to his house – he quickly went out of the car and said let me help you park the car. He thought he is trying to help – but this was the first time – I felt the female stereotype hitting me. I still don’t think a male colleague will get out of the car to help another male colleague without asking if they need help. I vividly remember exactly how I felt. This was the moment the gender difference affected me for the worse and I realised how strongly we all have these biases.

On one occasion, my partner and I went for dinner to our friend’s place and his wife was in the kitchen preparing the meal. She got upset with me because I did not help in the kitchen. We all should have helped her. But her expectation only from me showed the deeply ingrained stereotypes women also hold for each other.

It started to become apparent to me that subtle biases towards women exist, in men & women both. My own reaction to unfairly label the female colleague as aggressive came out of a bias. I recalled how I once held the assumption that women might be bad drivers before I began driving myself. People assuming a smart, working women is in HR, and not in tech also comes from a bias.

All I am trying to say is that since childhood, there is a bias in our minds on what men and women are supposed to do. And, that somehow gets reflected in our actions unintentionally. While, I don’t have an answer on how to deal with the biases – I just want us to be aware the next time we assume that a women is a bad driver or aggressive or if she is in HR – and you might want to hold back to the judgment for a while.

Chapter 4: Don’t let marriage kill your ambition

Fast forward to 2017 – I started my venture, and eventually became a solo founder. The startup community in Bangalore is very supportive and encourages more women to run their own with so many meet-ups and initiatives. Even though, startup failed – I learnt a lot about myself, what not to do when starting up and expedited my professional growth in those 3 years.

But, when the most common questions asked to you are whether I have another cofounder or whether an investor hit on me – or worse – if you get seed money, a few people also assumed that I hit on them – you do start to get doubts on yourself too. And, I was sure these uncomfortable assumptions would not be made for a male founder.

I was hiring for interns during the initial phase. During that time, I hired a married woman – one of the best salesperson I know. I was actually surprised when she readily took the job as an intern. When I asked why, she said she was not getting full time jobs after the gap after marriage.

During the same time, my sister was going through a divorce and the main reason was that she was a little too ambitious to be a wife. (But somehow, it was ok for a husband to be ambitious.) I love how my sister dealt with this and really proud of her to get out of the mess. I slightly judged her for not knowing her former-husband soon. And I thought, I will not ensure this doesn’t happen to me and I stay away from men who think like this.

But to my shock, a few years later, one of my close friends who was finding a life partner for him told me bluntly that he would not want a girl like me as his wife because I will not be able to handle a family since I am ambitious. There are ‘responsibilities’ of a family that I will not be able to prioritise. They are not encouraged to be ambitious and being dedicated to work has suddenly become a negative quality for them.

My heart sank so low.

During pandemic in 2020, I had to take a difficult decision of shutting down my venture. While it was a difficult call, I was looking forward to joining a startup where I could learn how to do things right when starting up.

I was doing a job hunt for the first time, since I graduated and it was very surprising when a few recruiters asked me whether I was married and if not, what my plans were to get married.

There was a clear pattern now. You know what this made me realise – marriage is bad for women who want to work. Basically for a woman, if you are a ‘marriage’ material, you are not a ‘workforce’ material. It started to make sense to me, why there were no female PhD profs in my college or why I have not seen enough women in leadership roles.

But why is that the case? Why is it difficult for only women to work after marriage?

For folks you don’t know, in an Indian Hindu wedding ceremony, there are vows that both the partners have to take. Sadly, these vows are sexist but explain the traditional duties of wife and husband in a marriage. The primary duties of wife are managing household, providing food, taking care of the children and being loyal to her husband. While the husband’s role is to provide love, wealth and protection to her.

In a traditional marriage – its the women who needs to make more time for kids and household.

I found a similar reference in Lean-in by Sheryl Sandberg, where she beautifully explains this. She writes that women from a very young age are told again and again that they will have to choose between family and work. Obviously, if women will have full time work at home, they will not be able to give 100% at work. She explains that is why we need the right partner, who could help at home, so you both can share the load of the home and have time for work.

I am currently working at Hotstar. When I joined, I was the only female in the tech leadership role. If we want more women in the senior positions, men would need to step up at home so that women won’t have to take hard decisions to choose personal life over work. And, if we have more women in the leadership as role models, there would be more women at the other levels, who would want to continue to stay in the workforce after marriage.

Chapter 5: Overcoming Self-doubt

Can you recall the feeling when you wanted to say something in a meeting, but you stayed silent and held back. Do you remember how you felt the last time you made a mistake. Do you apologise for tiniest things? How often do you underplay your success and put it on timing or luck, or external factors?

I have felt all these things. I still remember a deployment I approved, which caused a live issue and it still haunts me. Specially, in the technology domain where you will see more men, women subconsciously have a constant fear of being judged by the other gender, and because of this fear – women become very harsh to their own mistakes.

I recently got recognition at work – I couldn’t help but think of about so many folks who deserved it more than me. The super-confident girl that I was 15 years back had slowly changed and self doubt has somehow crept in. But why?

Now, lets discuss the other side. How often have you felt overridden at home. The gestures maybe different in each family – it could be indirect like gentle press on the hands or legs or a direct way asking them to not speak. In office on video calls – do you remember having to repeat yourself multiple-times before you are heard. Have you felt that your opinion didn’t matter in a discussion. Or, perhaps, has someone interrupted you in the middle of a conversation to finish your sentence.

The above things can happen to anyone irrespective of gender. But every time this happens, it shatters your self confidence a little, and based on several studies – women’s self confidence get impacted more with negative feedback compared to men in male-dominated domains and women were more likely to underestimate their abilities following criticism.

I am not writing this to justify why I or women have self-doubts. This is a super common feeling people have and everyone has their own reasons in their journeys – for ex. you did not get the right validation in your field, you were corrected multiple times at home, or people reacted a lot when you made small mistakes.

For me, just writing this helped me in acknowledging this feeling in myself and hopefully going forward – I will be more forgiving to myself when things don’t happen how I expected and take that opportunity to grow instead of sulk. And more importantly, I really need to believe in myself(cliche yet true).

Chapter 6: Equality starts in bed

Dating is a game where women hold a distinct advantage. Because of that, women define the course of evolution, since they select which genetic traits they wish to carry forward.

I met my partner when I was at Curefit, and when we got physically intimate – he made me feel satisfied. It was a sensation I had never experience before and I enjoyed it. Because we are talking about gender equality, I feel it is important to highlight the importance of mutual pleasure in a healthy, balanced relationship – since we don’t talk about this enough, specially in India.

Even though women have the dating advantage, sexual encounters mostly conclude with men’s pleasure and women not feeling sexually liberated is a common scenario even in cities.

My experience says that if a guy is respectful of your needs and is an equal partner in bed, he will also be an equal partner at home. And, I am fortunate to have such a guy.

Chapter 7 : Conclusion

My journey to realise my own bias towards women was . While we are in minority at workplace – we should not see other women as our competition. More importantly, I learned that I needed to be way more resilient at office – I may not always be heard or appreciated – but I just need to keep going. As a leader and a woman, I ensure to speak up if I am uncomfortable – the things I don’t speak up is the culture I am setting up that I am okay with that.

I am aware that I have a way more privileged life as a working woman in the city than many women in other parts of the country. But there are still biases in all of us for women, which need to be discussed in public. Women and men are not equal, their roles in the urban society are not equal yet, the way they experience the world may not be the same, and that’s alright. But highlighting that, is not a sign of weakness or call for attention.

Through this blog, I merely wish to answer why women empowerment needs to be discussed in cities, so that we eventually have more women role-models in currently male-dominated domains.