Role Reversal, ladies!

Last night I took a late flight from Islamabad to Lahore. Usually we see male pilots in the cockpit and air hostesses on the aisle. But last night I was pleasantly surprised to hear a female voice announcing from the cockpit that we are now landing and staff to take positions. The male flight attendants complied immediately. While this role reversal in the workplace is getting more and more common all over the world, it is still a bit uncomfortable in some parts of our society. Atleast in the urban areas, women in control are no longer a novelty. Although in the rural areas, women empowerment is still to be seen as an accepted reality, in urban areas, due to sheer financial compulsions, more and more girls are working and as a result, gaining independence and a stronger role in their families.

Whether financial independence necessarily translates into change in the societal roles for women, is still not a purity for independent, educated girls, or , for that matter, the uneducated but independent girls. Women in our society, whether independent or not, are still required to play the traditional roles that our society expects of them, and is used to. While the enforcement of these roles sometimes takes extreme forms like honor killing of a girl supporting her family, it usually takes milder forms like elders making sure that even if a female is working like a man in a man's world, she is supposed to take a supporting role in the house, that of the dutiful whatever she is in relation to her males, the companion, supporter, caregiver. Of course caregiving and nurturing, emotions, come naturally to a woman. But there are different qualities required to succeed professionally. As a working woman becomes more like men due to working in male dominated fields, she becomes less compatible in her roles at home as she brings these workplace qualities home to her personal relationships.

Naturally then, her relations with her family change. When we were growing up in the eighties and nineties, our female elders and some male relatives would call it that we have become outspoken, fast, headstrong and totally irreverent. This was only because girls who got educated and were given freedom gave voice to their opinion. This came as shock to elders and was disconcerting to say the least.

Some twenty years later, this is still the case. Men don't like to have independent ladies with minds of their own. Women are thought to be better if they are seen and not heard, they only applaud the thoughts of the men, and not at all is it ok if they disagree and worse, if they stick to their opinions. Unfortunately, men who are worth having usually are chauvinists, as naturally all confident meant think they are superior. So how do we manage? I guess reversing roles when we get out of houses, and then again when we get back in? This is a difficult balancing act. In the meanwhile, we keep on getting more and more space in the workplace. If more and more men get used to our changing roles, hopefully, we will have to do less role reversal at home and work.