The falling female gaze in the Assembly

The Karnataka Shops and Commercial Establishments Amendment Bill, 2024, which proposes a 14-hour working day, faced severe backlash from several industry stakeholders.

The proposed Bill was presented in a meeting convened by the labour department with various industry stakeholders. In a significant departure from the pro-worker welfare narrative, the Bill seeks to amend Section 7 of the Karnataka Shops and Commercial Establishments Act 1961, which stipulates the maximum daily and weekly hours for employees.

Currently, this section mandates that no employee in an establishment will be required to work for more than nine hours a day and up to 48 hours a week. It also mandates that the total number of work hours, including overtime, should not exceed 10 hours a day. 

The proposed Bill, however, is antithetical to labour rights in general and particularly detrimental to women. Women often bear the burden of domestic and caregiving duties. This double burden comes at a steep cost, as it is one of the possible reasons behind the high attrition rate of women in the information technology sector, which was as high as 40% in Karnataka as of December 2022.

Many women employees, unions, and rights-based organisations fear that this Bill will increase pressure on employers to ensure equality and safety of travel for women employees, possibly resulting in fewer women being hired as employers might prefer hiring men. 

In effect, although unintended, the proposed Bill is indirectly discriminatory against women. This is one such instance that necessitates employing a female gaze in law-making, as male-standard laws such as this proposed bill cannot cater to the differential needs and aspirations of women. Thus, simply put, laws need to be viewed through a feminist lens to ascertain their unintended impacts on women’s lives. This is to break the male standard of law and ultimately construct a lens through which the gendered impact of laws can be filtered. Now an interesting question arises: were laws always drafted keeping a male standard in mind?

Carole Pateman’s theory, espousing the male standard of law, points out that as women increasingly entered the public sphere traditionally occupied by men, there was a lag in the laws as well. This public-private divide is the main reason for curating the gendered differences reflected even to this day in the law and perspectives of the vast majority. It is due to this faulty perception that laws and regulations that govern the public sphere do not cater to the specific needs of women upon their transition from the private sphere to the public. The phenomenon explained above is more or less applicable universally, thereby buttressing the argument that women are indispensable to the law-making function to factor in women’s issues in a more authentic fashion. It is also a general assumption and an argument for women’s reservations that, in the face of proposed bills such as this, women in the state Assembly would act as a strong lobby for women’s issues, and finally that the presence of more women in the Assembly would lead to a change in the direction
of debates and policy with their distinct perspective and worldview. 

However, the female gaze is invariably linked to the number of female representatives in the Karnataka State Assembly. Research by PRS Legislative Research suggests that in every election in Karnataka held since 1962, women have been less than 5% of those elected to the state Assembly. In 2023, merely 10 women were elected to the present legislative assembly of the state, which is the lowest share among the southern states in India. This also ranks Karnataka among the sixth-lowest states in the country in terms of the number of elected women representatives. The concern also extends to political parties in the state not wielding women candidates in proportion to the rising women voters in the state. This is a major cause of concern for the deployment of the female gaze in lawmaking in Karnataka. A ray of hope, however, is the contingent implementation of the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam (Women’s Reservation Act), 2023. This Act of Parliament seeks to reserve 33% of the seats in the Lok Sabha and all state assemblies for a period of 15 years. It remains to be seen if this is a symbolic gesture or an actual attempt to honour women’s shakti in the true sense. 

(The writer is a research fellow at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy)