The sticky stairs problem

Before she gets near ladder of upwards mobility, there is a sticky staircase out of stultifying clutches of her family

Glass ceilings have been around a long while. It first got an airing in 1979 at a conference organised by Hewlett-Packard (HP) as part of the then-developing discussion about the mismatch between what was written company policy on promotion, as against the opportunities actually achieved by women at HP. It gradually came to wider usage and entered common parlance in 1986 with an article in The Wall Street Journal titled “The Glass Ceiling: Why women can’t seem to break the invisible barrier that blocks them from the top jobs”. Since then, its application has gone wider than gender to include minorities and is generally accepted as a reality rather than a bit of management-speak.

Without a doubt the Glass Ceiling is there for the women of Pakistan who work in the corporate world — or indeed work anywhere. But there is another layer to discrimination against women, and not just in Pakistan although this piece will focus on the local culture. For want of a better description I am calling it ‘Sticky Stairs’.

Sticky Stairs? Yup, the staircase that has to be ascended before a woman even gets within sight, never mind reach, of the Glass Ceiling. Stairs that are thickly coated with a glutinous mass of negatively charged particles that make the feet feel like a ton-weight and sap energy and ambition such is their power. Leeching away at physical and mental resources until a woman is exhausted by the struggle and eventually stops, often in mid-stride, often newly married or pregnant and never to lift a leg upwards for the rest of her working life.

Yet before she gets anywhere near the ladder of upwards mobility in her chosen job or profession, there is the sticky staircase to climb out of the stultifying clutches of her family, who have been busy disempowering her since the minute she left the womb.

Howls of disagreement from those women whose families have never greased the treads for them will be echoing now, and it is not them that this piece is aimed at. They still form a tiny if increasingly vocal minority, the women who work and have both voices and an accumulation of sufficient power — yes power — that enables them to traverse the sticky stairways where, in due course, even the majority of these women will bump their heads on the Glass Ceiling.

The cultural glue that holds society together is also the adhesive that goes on the soles of the feet of most women from the beginning of their lives. As noted above there are in statistical terms a tiny minority of women that do escape the shackles of the family, the smothering love that curtails all thought of independence and creates a cloying dependency that conforms, forever conforms, to crippling stereotypes. Be it attendance at primary school, travelling alone or unaccompanied, being born into purdah, poverty — and there is no shortage of that — or siblings that demand adherence to the norms of centuries — and centuries ago — in a world that is changing faster than their sclerotic paradigms, women have to climb the sticky stairs.

Assuming that a woman gets out of the graveyard of ambition that is the family the path upwards is never glue-free. There is no shortage of talented and ambitious women in my own line of work — journalism and the media in the broadest sense. But where are the women at a senior level? The women heading up channels? The women who are editors, or who do the hiring and firing? The women who determine policy and shape budgets? There is a sprinkling to be sure, but they are few and very far between. The media remains a man’s world — as, to a large extent, does that other purveyor of ephemera — the fashion industry.

Is it all bad news? No, the times they are indeed a-changin’ as Bob Dylan pointed out in January 1964, over half a century ago. They are not a-changing with equal speed for women worldwide, and it is slow going in Pakistan. The Glass Ceiling is a distant dream when the Sticky Stairs have to be climbed, and there will be few men willing to give a woman a leg up, will there?

Published in The Express Tribune, June 18^th,  2015.

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