7 beliefs that can silence women -- and how to unlearn them

Moderator: "A girl should
be seen, not heard."

"Be quiet." Or, "Chup."

These words are often used
to silence girls right from childhood,

well into adulthood,

and deep into old age.

I'm proud to introduce our next speaker,
a true champion of the female voice,

an advisor on poverty,

gender and development for the World Bank,

United Nations, and several NGOs
in India and the world over.

She calls herself a cultural detective.

Let's raise our voices to welcome
renowned social scientist and author

Deepa Narayan.

(Music)

(Applause)

Deepa Narayan: The goal
of every loving parent

is to raise good girls,

but what parents actually do

is to constrain, confine
and crush their girls.

So as they crush their girls,

they prepare them for abuse.

This would be so devastating

that no parent would be able to bear it,

so it's disguised.

In India, we call this "adjusting."

I'm sure you've heard the word.

"Darling, just adjust a bit.

Just adjust.

No matter what happens, just adjust."

"Adjust" trains girls to be powerless,

not to exist, not to be seen,

not to have a self,

and it trains boys to claim power
and authority over the world.

And in the meantime we keep talking about
gender equality and women's empowerment.

After 2012, after the gang rape
in a moving bus in Delhi,

I really wanted to understand
the roots of abuse.

So I started asking
a very simple question:

what does it mean to you
to be a good woman or a good man today?

And I was so surprised by what I heard,

the answers particularly
that young people gave,

that the project became a research project
and it took over my life.

For three years, I listened
to over 600 women, men and children,

educated, middle class,

and it led to 1,800 hours of listening

and 8,000 pages of notes

and it took another year
to make sense of it.

Nowadays, we see well-dressed, educated
women like many of you in this room,

all of you in this room, and myself,

and we think the world has changed,

but these external changes
are extremely misleading,

because on the inside,

we have not changed.

So today, I'm not going
to talk about poor people.

I'm going to talk only about
the middle and upper classes,

because are the ones most in denial.

We are the ones who have said
over and over again

that when women are educated,

when they're employed

and they earn incomes,

they will be equal, empowered, and free.

They're not.

Why?

From my research, I identify seven habits

that delete women,

that make women disappear,

but these habits persist

because they're so familiar to us

and we've made them good and moral.

Why would you change or drop
anything that's good and moral?

So, on the one hand, we love our children,

we love our daughters,

and on the other hand we crush them.

Habit one: you don't have a body.

The first step to make a girl a ghost
is to make her body disappear,

to pretend that she doesn't have a body.

A [?] who is 23 said,

"In my family, we never
spoke about the body, never."

And it is in this silence

that millions and millions of girls
get sexually molested,

and they don't even tell their mothers.

And it's the negative comments from others

that leads to 90 percent of women
saying that they dislike their bodies.

When a girl rejects her body,

she rejects her only house

and invisibility and insecurity

become her very shaky foundation.

Habit two: be quiet. Chup.

If you're not supposed to exist

and you don't have a body,

how can you have a voice?

So just about every woman said,

"When I was little, my mother
used to scold me and say,

'Don't speak, be quiet, be chup,

speak softly, don't argue,
and never answer back.

[??].'"

I'm sure you've all heard that.

And so girls become afraid
and they withdraw.

And they become quiet and they say,

"Let it go. [??].

What's the point? Nobody listens."

Educated women said

that their number one problem

was their inability to speak up,

as if there was a foot on their throat

ready to choke them.

Silence slices off women.

Habit three: be a people pleaser.

Please others.

Everyone likes a nice woman
who always smiles,

who never says no,

who is never angry,

even when she's being exploited.

Amisha, who is 18, said,

"My father said,

'If I don't see you smiling,
I don't feel good.'"

So she smiles.

So her father is teaching her,

my happiness is more important
than your happiness.

And in this business of trying
to make everyone happy all the time,

girls become afraid to make decisions.

And when you ask them, they say,

"Anything, whatever. [??]."

Everything goes. [??]

??, who is 25,

said with great pride,

"I'm highly elastic.

I become whatever others want me to be."

Such girls give up their dreams,

their desires,

and nobody even notices,

except for depression.

It moves in.

Another slice of a girl is taken off.

Habit four: you have no sexuality.

I think you'd all agree that
with a population of over 1.3 billion,

sex is not new to India.

What is new is that
more people now acknowledge

that women too
have a right to sexual desire.

But how can a woman who has not
been allowed to own her body,

who hasn't been educated about her body,

who may have been sexually molested,

who cannot say no

and who has been filled with shame,

how can she claim her sexual desire?

A woman's sexuality is suppressed.

Habit five: don't trust women.

Imagine how the world would change

if women came together in solidarity,

but as to make sure
that this doesn't happen,

our culture places high moral value

on loyalty to men and family secrecy.

Woman after woman said,

"I know only one trustworthy woman,

and that's me."

Even ??, who is 30

and who works on women's empowerment
at Delhi University, said,

"I don't trust women.
They're jealous and they backbite."

Obviously, then, in cities,

women don't join women's groups,

and when you ask them why, they say,
"We don't have time for gossip."

It's much easier to demolish
a woman who is alone.

Habit six: duty over desire.

?? gave a very long definition
of a good girl, and she's only 15.

"She is kind, gentle, polite, loving,

caring, truthful, obedient,
respects elders,

helps everyone unconditionally,
and is good to others, and fulfills duty."

Tiring, isn't it.

By the time you fulfill duty,

whatever little desire
is left is also lost.

And when sacrificing mothers
have nothing left to say

except talk about food --

"Have you eaten? [??]
What will you eat?" --

men like Saurabh, who is 24,
call them "boring."

A woman becomes a residue.

Habit seven: be totally dependent.

So all these habits
collectively crush women,

fill hear with fear,

and make her totally dependent
on men for her survival,

and this allows the system
of male power to continue.

So all these seven habits
that we thought were good and moral

snatch life away from girls

and position men to abuse.

We must change.

How do we change?

A habit is just a habit.

Every habit is a learned habit,

so we can unlearn them

and this personal change
is extremely important.

I had to change too.

But this doesn't change the system

that crushes millions of other women.

So we have to go to the roots.

We must change what it means
to be a good woman and a good man,

because this a foundation
of every society.

We don't need elastic women,
we need elastic definitions,

for men too,

and this big societal change
cannot happen without men's involvement.

We need you.

We need men to become champions of change,

to develop strong change muscles.

Otherwise, it will be two more centuries

before our girls, and our boys,

are safe and free.

Imagine half a billion women
coming together, with the support of men,

to talk to one another
for conversation, for change,

both personal and political,

and imagine men in their own circles,

and imagine women and men coming together
to just listen to each other

without judgment, without blame,

without accusations, and without shame.

Imagine how much we would change.

We can do this together.

Women, don't adjust.

Men, adjust.

It's time.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Moderator: Listening to her, I realized
that even in the simplest conversations

that we have with women,
we're actually being aggressive.

For example, I do tell
my daughter sometimes,

"??".

So, sorry, I will never do that.

??

Whatever you're doing,

??

Right?

(Applause)

How did you feel,

first listening to so many
unfulfilled stories, desires,

lack of independence,

of girls that you normally would assume
we think these girls are better off?

DN: Very depressed.

It was shocking for me,
and that's why I couldn't stop,

because I had no plans to do a study
and no plans to write a book.

I'd written 17 books before,
and I thought, "I'm done,"

but when I went to ?? College

and I heard, at most elite colleges
you well know from Delhi,

and the young women and the men,

what they said about what it meant
to them to be a woman and man

sounded not like me
but like my mother's generation.

So then I went to another college
and another college.

The thing that was striking to me

is that each woman felt she was alone,

that she hides her fear
and hides her behavior

because she thinks it's a personal fault.

It's not a personal fault, it's straining,

and I think that's the biggest revelation

is that, if we stop pretending,

then the world changes.

Moderator: Do you girls all agree
with what Deepa is saying?

(Applause)

Already see that young girl
saying, heard, heard what she said,

you say this to me.

Yeah, that's the way it should be.

You boys, you adjust.
We are not adjusting anymore, OK?

(Applause)

Thank you so much.
Have a good evening. Thank you.

(Applause)