Empowerment begins at home, literally (The F Word: Let's Talk Feminism & Gender and bakamoono.lk)

(This piece first appeared as part of a weekly column for - The Sunday Morning - a Sri Lankan national print newspaper. It was then republished on bakamoono.lk, a Sri Lankan Relationship Education Site under 'Insights')

Last week, I moderated a panel on female empowerment – not uncommon in my line of work. It was a beautiful event that comprised a morning tea complete with live music, delectable catered food, sparkling wine, and decorations. Some of Colombo’s most elite women and powerhouses in the corporate world milled around wearing beautiful designer labels and we spoke impassionedly of how women must support women. We said empowering women is a must and promised to live that reality. Before I ended the panel, I had just one thought I wanted to leave the gathering with. Who do we mean when we say “we want to empower women”? Is it just women who look and live like us? How many of us in our good and great intentions are blind to women in our own homes, who we forget to include in our journey?

According to the Labour Force Survey conducted in 2007, there was a total of 87,400 domestic workers in the country, out of which 60,400 were females. More recent estimates show an increase in numbers and acknowledge that the above figure doesn’t include “live-in” workers or those who work on a weekly or monthly basis. Women who function as domestic workers are women who many of us in the Colombo hamlet interact with every single day. Yet, how many of us have applied our women empowerment rhetoric to them?

Image Credit: Action Aid

We often talk of the struggle for working mothers and wives to balance house and home. Many upper-middle-class and middle-class women openly acknowledge that they are able to do so with the support of their domestics. What we tend to forget is that often these domestics too are working mothers. They have families, children, and the same struggles that we do in balancing house and home.

Equality for women from women

The Convention on Domestic Workers 2011 (also referred to as C189) found that domestic work frequently involves the blurring of lines between an individual’s place of employment and her place of residence. This context places a residential domestic worker at a heightened risk of abuse and harassment by her employer. When we talk of working wives and mothers and the support we need to offer them, it is imperative that this discussion includes all women who work and have families. Do we engage our domestics in this conversation? Consider the hours we ask them to work? Apply the same standards of dignity and rights to them? This also extends to maternity leave and support.

In my observations, I have also noticed that another area which is often overlooked for domestics is sanitation. I have regularly been appalled at the state of bathrooms in homes that are regaled for the use of domestics – broken, badly maintained, and in some cases outside. This, as we know, greatly impacts women, especially when they are menstruating. Do we consider that many of the women we employ menstruate? How do they change their pads, dispose of them, and clean themselves in comfort? These are basic health rights that any office or organisation would be mauled for failing to meet, so why should our homes as places of employment be any different?

Over the last few years, I have watched the Colombo skyline change, as seemingly every month a new high-rise (and expensive!) residential development is designed and built. These are projects developed and created now. Visiting the show apartments (which they assure you are “exact” replicas of what the apartments will be), the size of the rooms allocated for “live-in” domestics appalled me. One only has to place a standard single-size bed and at least 60-70% of the room is filled. There is hardly room to even have a standing fan. Many are actually small storerooms – narrow and airless. We demand bay windows, wood flooring, particular views, and all manners of comfort for the main bedrooms, but when was the last time humane living quarters for domestics crossed our minds as a requirement?

To practice before we preach

One more thing comes to mind – sexual harassment. It is time we generate a conversation with those around us who we ignore on this topic. Most of these women travel by bus daily, they go home late because we had given them work, they travel at peak hours to get to our homes on time, often facing salary cuts and a tongue-lashing if they are late. We quote the UNFPA study, we share articles on Facebook, we rage-comment online and say “terrible no men?” to each other. Do we ask our domestics what they face? Give them a safe space and support to talk about what they may have endured? Realise that they too are women and endure this?

Have a chat and start the conversation today. Remember, as those from more privileged circumstances, this does not mean we need to swoop in and “rescue” people with our assumed solutions. We don’t always know what is best. Start by talking and really listening. Help them find options that work for them. Don’t force your own solutions and put aside the saviour notion. Listen. Use your position of power to make things change. Centre the person and not your ego in this.

These women are capable and do make decisions every single day, just as we do. They are empowered, some in ways we don’t even realise or understand. Work with them with a sense of solidarity and awareness, some experiences are universal to all women and some depend heavily on our class and circumstances. We need to start by understanding this and listening. It’s not about the one big gesture that makes us feel good, but how we make an effort to change everyday approaches we can control that move towards changing accepted norms.

It is time we moved empowerment beyond a rhetoric and sexy buzzword only used in fancy events and in cocktail chats. It is time we started to really think about what accessing basic rights and dignity really means for all women – including the ones we may fail to see. It is time we move from lip service to integrating it into our daily actions, from slogans to lived realities.