Engendering Political Science in the Classroom

This year, in the annual Gender Gap Index of the World Economic Forum, India was ranked at a low 114th position out of 136 countries. In India, disparity between men and women in estimated earned income is high with women earning $1,980 compared to $8,087 earned by men. Not only does India have one of the lowest percentages of firms with female participation in ownership; women in India daily spend an average of five more hours on unpaid work than men—the highest difference in the countries surveyed. With respect to women’s health and survival, India was reported to have shown the least improvement of the countries studied, ² and of course, since December 2012, India has become infamous for extreme cases of, and widespread, sexual violence against women. Such stark inequalities make the study of gender relations a test case for political science, a discipline the object of which is to explain and analyze differences in power. Surely it would be difficult for political scientists now to exclude the case of gender as one example of how power impacts a specific social group.

No wonder then, if we look at the syllabi of many political science departments across Indian universities, both at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels, we find included a component on gender. Courses on ‘Political Thought in Modern India’ discuss the writings of women writers like Pandita Ramabai, and courses on ‘Key Texts in Political Thought’ include thinkers like Mary Wollstonecraft and Alexandra Kollontai, along with Gandhi and Rawls. Indian politics courses, for example, a course on the political process in India, will include a section on ‘Class, Caste, Tribe and Gender’ and will discuss the women’s movement in India as a new social movement. Since most constitutions forbid discrimination on the basis of sex, courses studying ‘Constitutionalism’ analyze constitutional provisions attempting to bring about parity between the sexes. Courses in ‘International Politics’ review feminist approaches to international relations and ‘Political Philosophy’ courses sometimes include, in their listing of key concepts, the feminist concept of ‘care’ along with the concepts of ‘civil society’ and ‘state’. Moreover, all BA and MA programmes in political science in India offer optional papers, and invariably a few of these optional (elective) courses will be on ‘Feminist Theory’ or on ‘Gender and Politics’ or on ‘Women and the Indian Political Process’ or will analyze feminist debates in political theory. ³

By thus including gender as one component of what it studies, has political science addressed the problem of women’s inequality outlined at the beginning of this article? It is acknowledged now that gender, like nationality, or class, extensively impacts how individual lives turn out. Gender is not a biologically determined identity and comes to be deployed differently depending on social and political conditions—that makes it a quintessentially political category. But do political scientists see gender as one of their categories, of the same order as the categories of ‘the political’, ‘justice’, ‘the state’ and ‘non-domination’? If so, then why do not the compulsory courses of political science, like the courses on research methodology, have a section on feminist ethnography or necessarily discuss the work of feminist philosophers of science like Helen Longino, along with that of Popper and Kuhn? Political theory is another compulsory segment of political science, and the resurgence of political theory in the last quarter of the twentieth century was also partially driven by the large number of feminist interventions in political theory. Then why is it that only when the individual instructor is inclined that way, that classroom lectures on the topic of justice will also touch on the issue of justice in the family, or the distinction between the public and the private, which is central to constructions of liberty, will be analyzed in terms of its impact on women’s freedom? Should we think of replacing the texts of Rawls by those of Carole Pateman in our compulsory political thought courses? When we teach comparative politics, another compulsory paper in political science, and we try to explain the process of democratization in different countries, should we not focus on the position of women as one of the markers of democratization? An interesting feature of democracy in India is that whereas increasing voter turnout rates from rural India or of population groups like other backward castes are accompanied by the increasing representation of such groups in Parliament, however, in the case of women, a significant increase in their turnout rates (in many Indian states in the general election in 2014, more women voted than men ⁴ ) has not translated at all into any increase in their presence in Parliament. But is this discrepancy between political participation and political representation in the case of women considered an important issue for study in political science classes? The raising of these questions signals that unfortunately gender remains an ‘optional’ category in political science.

To add gender as an optional category to political science courses has already been done. This additive process leaves many dissatisfied because mere addition does not reveal the gendered nature of our political concepts. It is not enough to map the process of the extension of the rights of citizenship to women; the claim is that we will learn more about the nature of citizenship when we understand the gendered nature of citizenship. The categories of political science, from the beginning, have assumed the absence of women from certain areas, or rather, their overwhelming presence in other areas, like the areas of unpaid work or the area of reproductive labour. This separation of men and women into different spheres of social life, which shows up also in the sexually segregated labour market, has nothing to do with what is natural to men and women but is a distinction that is maintained by force. Women’s ‘difference’, defined as an inferiority or a lack—women are less rational, less active, less competent—is what is used to paint the world of men in bright colours. That is why it is important to demand that gender must not be merely added but must be integrated in a more fundamental way in the mainstream subjects of political science, sociology, history and economics so that the gendered character of the categories of ‘productive labour’, ‘gross national product’, ‘citizenship’, ‘the public’ and the ’individual’, to name just a few, will be highlighted. It is only when this demand is unable to overcome the resistance from mainstream social science, or when the ‘big’ departments do not move beyond their token optional courses on women ⁵ that separate women’s studies centres are set up to teach courses, for instance, on ‘Themes in the Study of Gender, Labour and Work’, ‘Caste and Gender: History and Memory’, ‘Legal Terrains: Gender Concerns’ and ‘Feminist Theory and Social Research’. ⁶

Gender constitutes a whole universe, so we must continue to push for it to be integrated more extensively in political science syllabi. It is not enough to have one optional course on women in political science departments. This strategy of teaching gender issues through one optional course faces the problem of the course being branded as a ‘special interests’ course: political science students taking optional courses on the women’s movement or feminist political theory often complain about being asked by fellow students as to why are they interested in learning only about women. Students are still surprised to learn that whereas 80 per cent of women over the age of 15 in Nepal, and 73 per cent of women in Vietnam are part of the paid work force (the corresponding figure in India is 29 per cent) yet only in 11 per cent of cases, women own some land, and only in 6 per cent of cases do women own partial or full ownership of a house in Nepal. The percentage of women owning farm or forest land in rural areas in Vietnam is just 8 per cent. ⁷ Why is it so relevant to the study of political economy that ‘the richest 1 per cent of adults owned 40 per cent of global assets in 2000’ or that ‘the three richest people in the world possess more financial assets than the annual combined GDP of 47 countries with the lowest GDP’, ⁸ but these statistics highlighting the discrepancy between women and men in control over economic resources are not considered as significant for political economy. Analysis of such statistics teaches one not only about gender but also about inequality, power and discrimination, which is what political science is about. Sometimes, optional courses on gender in political science will include a unit on ‘marginalized masculinities’; this, however, is just a mirroring of the tactic of inserting a component on the women’s movement in political science courses. Instead of this compensatory strategy, which does not really work, we must study both how gender constructs the political and how political processes impact gender.

Teaching gender in political science classes also allows us to bridge the gap between political theory and political principles and policy issues. References to falling child sex ratios or to instances of domestic violence faced by women in classes on gender and politics make the students ask about the link between general theories of gender inequality and specific legal and policy interventions for addressing such situations. When we contrast conceptions of care to conceptions of justice, for example, students become interested in debating which policies are compatible with the ethics of care. To think about replacing the ‘universal breadwinner’ model with a possible ‘universal caregiver’ model will require certain mechanisms—in the form of parental leaves or training programmes in care-giving work or other procedures that the students can come up with. Teaching gender in political science courses also makes the classroom more interactive with students eager to put forward their own point of view regarding practical interventions or willing to learn from each other’s gendered experiences.

For all these reasons given above, gender issues should not be confined to optional courses in political science, but attempts must be made to integrate the category of gender in the standard syllabi of political science.