When the happy family poster is infiltrated by a gender stereotype

By Dip Sengupta
I was sitting in the reception area of a bank. In these dystopian times, a few of us customers were waiting warily for our turn at the counter — quiet, masked and socially distanced. My phone was in my pocket — I hadn’t taken it out — one less thing to sanitise upon returning home.
So, waiting for my number to be called, I did the next best thing. I started looking around.
That’s when I saw it — a large wall wrapping, carrying two advertisements for the bank — a happy family of four, father, mother, daughter — about 10 — and son — around 8, in a drawing room, sitting and interacting with each other, smiling.
Then my token was called on the LED screen and gathering up my file, I went to my counter and thought no more of it.
But something about those images came back later.
As I recalled, in the first image, the family was sitting on a sofa, the father, mother and daughter forming a cosy unit at one end of it and smiling and laughing among themselves — a warm metaphor of togetherness. The son was at the other end of the sofa, smiling and doing his thing with his smartphone.
The other image had a similar but softer dynamic. The father and the daughter were sharing a warm daddy-daughter moment, and the mom and son were sharing another. While the daughter had an angelic, almost mature smile on her face, the son was making a brattish face at his mom.
So far, so good. The message of the happy family in their perfect home and the bank’s role in their happiness was coming through.
But was there another message that was being transmitted as well, albeit unintentionally?
I wondered. In the first image, was it only the duty of the daughter to appear sweet and angelic, participating wholeheartedly in the family dynamics while her brother could afford to be shown to be doing his own thing, linked to the family unit but clearly a little removed? And in the second image, while the daughter again was being her usual saccharine-sweet self, it was okay for the brother to be a little self-centred brat.
Why couldn’t the little girl be the brat? Why couldn’t the little girl play with a smartphone? Or, to turn things around a bit, why couldn’t the brother be saccharine sweet?
Was the burden of being the sweet, connected one in the family the little girl’s lot? And was the little boy subconsciously being given an indulgent get-out-of family obligations pass? And that too at such an early age?
Was I overthinking a seemingly innocent visual? Perhaps. In which case, the deconstruction I was attempting was just a thought exercise as I waited for my turn at the counter. Or was it something else? Was the dynamic of the brother-sister duo a fleeting visual depiction of the gender asymmetry in our society, which saw nurturing, caring and affective roles as natural for women?
According to noted sociologists Uma Chakravarty and Leela Dube, women have been historically relegated to the homogenous world of the home while men are seen as natural “controllers” of the outer world, of politics, commerce and trade — the age-old fault lines of our society.
According to a United Nations report, while India’s GDP has grown by around 6% in the past decade, there has been a significant decline in female labour force participation from 34% to 27%, with the male-female wage gap stagnant at 50%. And according to a recent Unicef report, India is the only large country where girls are also more likely to drop out of school.
And what stared back at me from the wall seemed to be a self-perpetuating cycle — the yin and yang of gender bias — well-meaning communication unconsciously drawing cues from the insidious seepage of societal bias and in turn projecting the same as acceptable, normalised behaviour.
The depiction of the little girl, sweetly integrated with her parents in both the pictures, is a paragon of familial expectations. The depiction of the little boy, brattish, a little distant, inward looking, focused on his smartphone.
The picture on the wall at the bank was more than just a picture.
It was the writing on the wall.
[The author is Head (North) and Chief Growth Officer, Creativeland Asia]