IPL's bimbettes and him-bettes

SECOND TAKE Kalpana Sharma If you wanted an illustration of how private capital and media come together to sing the same tune, you only had to watch the IPL auction in Bangalore telecast live over two days, January 8 and 9. For two days, non-stop, the auction was covered by the main news channels. Nothing else mattered. Only the money. Once again, news television went overboard. We are a cricket-mad country. No one can deny that although many still question whether the IPL is really cricket. Still, the nature and the amount of coverage raise several questions. First, was this kind of election-style coverage necessary? How many people were really interested or even cared about the money being thrown about? Second, how did the channels decide to set aside regular news and spend a good part of the day giving a ball-by-ball account of the sale of cricketers? Did they conduct some kind of survey to assess viewer interest or did they just make a calculated guess? Third, did the certainty of a good part of the millions being talked about coming their way during the IPL fuel the decision? Were they ‘prompted’ to do this with actual financial support, another form of cheque-book journalism? Why do we ask these questions? Because the IPL is about big money as was evident from the size of the purses displayed during the auction. This is not small change; it is serious money. The team owners and the BCCI will only recover these sums if the IPL draws viewers and advertising support. How will this happen if the hype and excitement before the matches begin is not sufficiently pumped up? And who better to do it than television channels? The link is so obvious that one can be forgiven for jumping to the conclusion that there was more than just a ‘news-sense’ decision behind the full two-day coverage of the auction. Apart from the suspicion that the decision to given blanket coverage was prompted by promises of some of the lucre, it was extraordinary to see how the entire exercise seemed to erase recent memory of the seedy scandals surrounding the IPL and its chief promoter, Lalit Modi. The full story of that scandal has yet to be told. But on those two days, it was business as usual without the presence of Modi. As Anupam Mukherji wrote in his column Fake IPL Player in Mumbai Mirror (January 11, 2011), the auction “still had all the bearings of the Modi-era. The two new teams fit in well with the IPL culture by choosing hideously coloured outfits, Shilpa Shetty, who till the other day couldn’t tell the difference between swing and spin, was seen deciding team compositions.”  Cricket remains a man’s game even though Indian women’s cricket team, and that of other countries, plays the same game. You would never know that if you read our sports pages. But apart from that, some kind of ‘gender-balance’ is now the norm thanks to the induction of Mandira Bedi during the World Cup some years ago and the guaranteed media attention that she drew. Today Bedi has morphed into a commentator who seems to know her cricket; hence her presence during the IPL auction on Times Now. CNN-IBN had Latika Khaneja, who got noticed when everyone realized that she ‘managed’ Virendra Sehwag. Khaneja is serious about her business and knows it too. Yet, predictably, both women were asked to comment on the attire of two of the owners – Shilpa Shetty of the Rajasthan Royals and Preity Zinta of the Kings XI Punjab, the bimbettes if you will. Yet none of the men were asked to comment on the excessive gel on Siddharth Mallya’s hair or the bright orange Tshirts worn by the Kochi team, or what Ness Wadia wore – the ‘him’-bettes. A little bit of misogyny is probably par to the course in a game that has been designed to sell for its ‘sex appeal’ – via the cheer leaders, not the quality of the game. And significantly, neither the men nor the women on the panels were asked to comment on the other woman owner – Nita Ambani of the Mumbai Indians. Clearly, advertising clout zips up loose talk. Given the amount of useless chatter that filled those hours during the auction, it was amazing that everyone held off on commenting on Nita Ambani, on what she wore or how she functioned. Mukherji had no such qualms when he wrote, “Nita Ambani, after successfully buying Rohit Sharma, was congratulated via handshakes by a table full of lackeys as if she had coached the batsmen.” In fact, given the latest development from the house of Tatas, where an unwritten directive has gone to all Tata companies to avoid certain publications that featured the Niira Radia tapes and Ratan Tata, media houses must know how far they can go with the powerful.  Most striking of all was that there was not even a hint of anything critical being mentioned about the very fact of cricketers being auctioned. To get some perspective on this entire tamasha, read Sharda Ugra, well-known sports journalist who is now a Senior Editor with crickinfo.com. In her column titled, “The joke was on cricket”, Ugra fills us in on the background of auctions and how humans have never been auctioned, except of course when slavery still existed.  “Before the IPL turned up, the word ‘auction’ was understood to be ‘public sale’ of ‘goods’ or ‘property’ or ‘articles’ or ‘merchandise’. No dictionary contains the mention of people in an auction because in the history of mankind, the only human beings ever involved in public auctions were slaves.” Ugra also goes on to explain that no other sport in the world has anything resembling the IPL auction: “There is no respectable sport in the world whose athletes go up for auction. Not even in the richest professional leagues in the world. Not in European or North American football, not the NBA, not the NHL. The words, ‘franchise’, ‘commissioner’, ‘salary cap’ belong to American sport which is what inspired Lalit Modi to rework the idea into Indian cricket. So why abandon its steel frame: the league regulations, the minimum wage. Modi somehow thought nothing of borrowing and adapting into cricket the most common form of player hire in American leagues: the rookie drafts. (The BCCI thought the auction was a good idea.)” So what is about our media that it has stopped questioning and simply follows the money? ‘Paid news’ is clearly morphing into so many different forms that we will need a special commission to track it full-time.

(To read the original, click on the link above)

Twists, turns, dead-ends

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, May 2, 2010

THE OTHER HALF

KALPANA SHARMA

The Sunanda episode leaves us with some hard questions, about the attitude of the media to women, about sexism and other hurdles that women face everyday at the workplace...

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Sunanda Pushkar is not the first professional woman who has had to face innuendo and sexist remarks.

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Photo: PTI

Hounded by the media: Sunanda Pushkar.

The IPL is finally over. Now we can get on with life, with more important issues, such as the number of hungry people in this country where some children are fed mud for dinner, or the actual number of people so poor that they have to be exceptional optimists to believe that there will be a better day tomorrow, or millions of people surviving without electricity and water as the sun's rays get ready to roast the country with the approach of a sizzling summer. Yes, there is life beyond the IPL. Indeed, there was life during the IPL that was almost forgotten.

Though the matches have ended, unfortunately the IPL saga continues to unravel and hog headlines. But when and if it finally recedes to an inside page or off television screens, perhaps most people will have forgotten the Sunanda Pushkar episode.

Wrong priorities

At least that is what she will hope although she is unlikely to forget the treatment she received at the hands of the Indian media. You can debate whether she was as culpable as Shashi Tharoor when she accepted what appears to be a special favour, but the issue that the media focused on was not the impropriety of that as much as the private life and times of one woman. Why? Because she is a woman and the media is sexist, as Tharoor suggested? Or because some people decided that a woman like that should not be seen in the company of powerful upper class men like Tharoor? Or was it a combination of class bias and misogyny? However you read it, the media's attack on Sunanda Pushkar was crass, in bad taste and lacked the basic modicum of decency. You don't kick those who can't defend themselves. These are basic principles of fair play. But all that was forgotten in the IPL scrum.

There is another dimension to this story. Sunanda Pushkar is not the first professional woman who has had to face innuendo and sexist remarks. This is something many professional women worldwide would have faced to a lesser or greater degree at some stage in their lives. Of course, there is a tendency amongst women who are successful to forget such experiences, or brush them off as occupational hazards of being a professional woman. But scratch the surface, talk to women who are still struggling to get ahead, and you will hear many similar stories. “How did she land this job?” “Who is her godfather?” “Whose favourite is she?” “Did she use her ‘womanly wiles' to get ahead?” Etc, etc, etc. If you are young and reasonably attractive, and you get a prized position within an organisation, these and other questions are almost inevitable. No one is prepared to believe that you can get a job or a promotion on your own merit. Yet, when your male counterpart gets ahead through powerful contacts, or through influence, he is envied, considered smart.

The issue goes beyond petty sexism, which is just one of the hurdles women still have to overcome to get ahead. The root problem is the absence of a level playing field, where both men and women are evaluated on the basis of their capabilities. If indeed that had been the case, surely many more women would by now have reached top positions in many professions. Yet data from around the world shows us that this is still not the case.

In her book The Equality Illusion, The Truth about Women and Men Today (Faber and Faber, 2010), Kat Banyard gives the following data: In the 50 largest publicly traded corporations in the European Union, women constitute only 11 per cent of the top executives and four per cent of CEOs and heads of boards. In Britain, 22 of the 100 top FTSE companies do not have a single woman on their boards. In the US, only 15.2 per cent of Fortune 500 board directors are women.

Banyard suggests that the problem is not just one barrier. She writes:

What we are looking at here is not a single, invisible barrier quietly lying in wait outside the boardroom or at the door of the Oval Office. We are looking at the cumulative effect of women being restricted by outdated structures and attitudes at every level in the workplace. Alice Eagly, a professor at Northwestern University, and Linda Carli, associate professor at Wellesley College, point out that the term ‘glass ceiling' fails to capture fully how women are excluded from power in the twenty-first century because it implies an absolute barrier at a specific level. They suggest ‘ labyrinth' as a more accurate metaphor for what women are faced with. Right from the start the route to the top is littered with twists, turns and dead-ends as women negotiate colleagues' stereotypes and the lack of flexible working. Women have to navigate it from the minute they step into the office, not just when they are trying to open the door to the boardroom.

Indeed, a “labyrinth” that surely includes sexist innuendo. Women have to develop an especially thick hide to ignore all this and carry on. Many fall by the way side for this and other reasons, most having to do with the fact that they are women, that they are still expected to be the principal care givers for their children, and to “sacrifice” careers for family and marriage.

Even in sectors like IT, where women have found greater opportunities to succeed, the playing field is far from level. In a recent article in The New York Times (April 18, 2010), Claire Cain Miller spoke to several women in the sector in the US who wanted to launch their own start-ups. One of them was Candice Fleming who had worked with Hewlett-Packard and a small software company. But when she wanted to raise funds for Crimson Hexagon, a company she co-founded in 2007, she was told by a venture capitalist she approached that she need not bother to have a business card because they would refer to her as “Mom”. Another invited her to spend a day on his boat and showed her a naked picture of himself on the boat. How many men go through something even remotely similar? She approached 30 venture capital firms. None responded. Finally Golden Seeds, a fund that helps women setting up firms, gave her funds. And hers is not a lone example.

Different rules

The point remains that the environment for women in the professional world is not always welcoming. In India, cronyism is now so accepted that no one thinks about it. Yet men who get ahead riding on that cronyism do not have to face the personal flak that women do. And that is where the sexism lies.

So the Sunanda Pushkar episode might well be a blip on the horizon. But it should make us ask some hard questions: about the attitude of the media towards women, about sexism and other hurdles professional women face during their careers and about what it will take to ensure equality and equity in the workplace.

(To read the original, click on the link above)