Spouse of life: a feminist view

I have been reading all the press about the propriety or lack of it when the finance minister’s wife gets retained by a client organisa...

I have been reading all the press about the propriety or lack of it when the finance minister’s wife gets retained by a client organisation whose big boss happens to be her husband. As a staunch feminist and a hard core professional, I am surprised by this very gender biased discussion that is going on. In all the judging and weighing of the evidence on all counts, and in all the pronouncements reported in and made by the media, I have read just one that characterises this as a story relating to the “occupational hazards” of a well qualified professional, with her own private practice, who happens to be a woman, and happens to be married to the finance minister (see ‘The Indian Express’ editorial, August 31). I am even more surprised that amidst all the analysis, there isn’t even one piece or person who was gender equal enough to ask the question: would she have been qualified to get this assignment on the strength of her own professional credentials? Forget the question not being asked, I think the unanimous assumption seems to be that the answer is a clear “no”. And I think therein lies the unfairness on how this issue has been debated.

I cannot but help speculate about what might have happened had the reverse situation occurred — a successful, well-qualified male lawyer married to a woman who was the finance minister. I am not saying the final verdict of “wrong or right” would necessarily have been any different — frankly I don’t know — but it sure as hell would have been a lot kinder, and a lot more acknowledging of the individual’s credentials to have got things “on his own steam” ; and perhaps even some debate on what the Express editorial calls “respecting the autonomy as a professional”. At the risk of alienating many men reading this, I would even venture a guess that the man in question would have used his professional credentials in defence of himself — but then, of course, it would be socially unacceptable for a woman to do so!

Thank God this would not be a typical incident in the corporate world. There is a well-defined framework of disclosures (and for keeping confidentiality), and a well understood set of tests of reasonableness for what could represent a conflict of interest. And it is not automatically assumed that qualified women, who have husbands in high places, get business merely because of that. In fact, when I first started working in the late ’70s, there was a lot of that discussion going around — who she knew and what she did to get what she got.

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Mercifully, and thanks to the many women who brooked no nonsense on these counts of innuendo, things have changed totally. Most relieving of all, it is not a cause for general suspicion and disbelief that the client list of one spouse may not be known to the other.

However I am repeatedly told by my friends in government that the rules are different for folks in government and their families. I don’t know enough about this, but I guess that like many other laws of the land which were framed to cater to a different set of circumstances, this one too was framed for an era when wives were stay-at-home women, and so if they were given an assignment by any entity that the husband was associated with, it could only mean that there was fraud going on!

I once applied for a job with a foreign bank many years ago; and when the offer was made, it was subject to “spouse being approved”. The top management had to meet my spouse to determine if he were socially fit enough to join the bank family. Needless to say I turned the job down. My spouse was not the one who was being considered for the job, or who was going to help me do the job — I was going to have to do it on my own. The real reason, they sheepishly explained later, was that in the days of yore, everyone lived in the same building or colony, and so they did not want a quarrelsome “lower social class” wife upsetting the equilibrium! Today, companies who frequently transfer executives around are beginning to find that they can’t insist on such mobility, because the wives work too, and are very career focused themselves, and refuse to move all the time.

Professional women now have several forums where women empowerment and breaking the glass ceiling are discussed. I have been invited to a major one next month called the “power of you”. I am thinking that maybe one of the things we should discuss is “how do we earn the right to the fruit of our own labour; and the right to the dignity of being a professional first and a wife next, in our professional world”?

The writer is a strategic marketing and brand consultant