(Names in the article changed to protect privacy)
Not long ago, I was talking to a gentleman about twenty years my senior, who is something of a mentor to me, about some of my recent work.
“It’s great,” he said, “very original, very creative.” I was elated.
“Very nice,” he went on, “It’s very rare for women after a certain stage in their life to be this creative.”
Wow. That’s a bit of a left-handed compliment, I thought. I asked him what he meant by a “certain stage of their life”. “Well,” he hedged. “When women get married, have kids…you know?”
I was not too happy about the comment. But later, when I was talking to a few of my friends who are in “that stage of their life” – women, late 20s to early 30s, married, with a toddler or two in tow – they echoed similar sentiments. They were happier to do something part-time or routine at work, if they were working, to give them more time for home and personal sanity. I asked them, a little naively I admit, about their childhood hobbies that we had bonded over in school and college. These women said that they just didn’t have the time. Taking time out to engage in creative pursuits just for its own sake seemed to be the last thing on their to-do list.
I started thinking about gendered notions of creativity and what my mentor had said. Was it true? Could he have had a point?
What is creativity? Why is it important?
The state of being creative – using our imagination to create something new – is pure joy. When we are creative, we are in touch with ourselves and our ideas. Whether we make a sculpture, a recipe or write a great piece of code, it is a creation in which we have invested a part of ourselves in.
I think creativity is not restricted to a particular task; it’s a joyful mind-state that permeates all aspects of our life. Many luminaries in history had hobbies that they excelled at. They were in a perpetual state of creative hyper-drive, shaped by doing something new and interesting all the time, whether they were working or playing. In fact, such creative task-switching seemed to help them be more productive. Einstein was a talented violinist and played the piano; when stuck with a problem in physics, he used to play music for a while which spurred new ideas! However, social perceptions of creativity are highly coloured by gender. The comment made by the gentleman about diminishing creativity in women after marriage and kids is part of a larger ecosystem where women are considered less creative than men overall. Our language reflects it: fundamental, creative ideas are called “seminal”. We hear, time and again, of how there aren’t enough “truly great” women writers, poets, artists, music composers, directors and scientists, “true greatness” usually defined by somebody with a Y chromosome. The presence of fewer women in fields that supposedly require intuition and creative genius, such as theoretical physics and improvisational jazz, is happily explained away by the fact that women are less creative.
Are women really less creative, or are they perceived to be so?
The cost of not being perceived creative is huge in today’s world. Even a task that looks mundane from the outside, like coding, requires a liberal dose of creativity. Ultimately, people who make it big in their careers would be people who can come up with and execute original ideas. A recent report in the Harvard Business Review mentioned a survey of 1500 CEOs, where they identified creativity as the “most important skill for the future”.
Unfortunately, our perceptions of creativity are demonstrably biased by gender. A recent peer-reviewed study in the journal, “Psychological Science” reported that participants associate stereotypically “macho” characteristics like “daring”, “risk-taking” and “self-reliance” with out-of-the-box thinking and innovation. However, even women who seem “macho” are still perceived to be “less creative” compared to men with measurably similar perceptions of macho-ness. Thus we seem to have a socially-learned bias against the creative prowess of women. This is very much a contributing factor to the glass ceiling that impedes the professional advancement of women.
We also have biased perceptions of what “counts” as creativity. In our social past, we can recall grandmothers and widowed grand-aunts who were not educated in the contemporary sense. However some of them could make 100s of rasam varieties, or had a treasure trove of mythological stories that even Vyasa wouldn’t have known. However, they were at best called “custodians of traditional knowledge”, and at worst an object of pity: “paavam, pozhudhu pogalai” (poor thing, she doesn’t have anything to do). That a domestic endeavor can be a source of creativity is an idea that I think we as a society should acknowledge and celebrate more.
Creativity and time
Creativity needs time; lots of it, to practice, to bounce around ideas, to make multiple drafts. Sometimes one just needs time to sit and stare into the distance and wait for an idea to come.
“Women don’t spend as much time exercising their creative muscle. Family, children etc. are just excuses. The problem is simply that women just don’t take ownership over their time.”
When I asked my mentor why he thought women “after a certain stage” were less creative, this was his answer. It sounds patronizing. But I was sufficiently intrigued: beyond differences in perception, were men and women spending their time differently? Do men really “take ownership” over more of their time to be creative? Are women pre-occupied with family and children way more than men are?
Looking at the evidence, such as this study, there appears to be some truth to this. In science, the position of Principal Investigator (PI), where one can manage their own lab, is a role that comes with tremendous creative freedom and prestige. Creativity matters in science, whether it is in coming up with hypotheses, designing experiments or writing up their work, and that needs a lot of time. Applicants train for more than a decade after college – six years of PhD and four to seven years of post-doctoral positions. By the time one gets their own position, they are typically in their late thirties. For women, however, these rigorous training periods overlap with the demands of their “biological clock”. This is significant; it seems to be the direct cause for why fewer women end up pursuing the PI position.
The study reveals that women seem to care more about managing children and caring for their families than similarly aged men. More than 21% of women, but only 7% of men, said that plans to have children were important considerations in planning their career. Another way of putting this is that fewer men care about how childcare would affect their career! This is important.
A recent interview with an acclaimed film director in Tamil cinema, someone who has made the finest movies of our times, featured him casually saying that he goes for months at a time without seeing his children. He could not even remember what class they were studying in. His wife manages the family, he said; he spends all his time in his studio, brainstorming, coming up with ideas and making brilliant films. This attitude of casual callousness was met with applause for his creative abilities and appreciation for the “supportive” wife.
I doubt if, in our social milieu, any woman would be able to take complete ownership of her time, with complete disregard for the day-to-day running of a family, like the director. I believe these attitudes of relegating women to the “supporting” role, even in today’s day and age, comes from the combination of two very simple ideas: the emphasis society puts on a woman’s role as a home-manager and mother, and the studious ignoring of their status as human beings.
The ingrained guilt that comes from the former attitude is insidious. When a woman is constantly hounded by a sense that she is not spending her time in the “right” way, then “taking ownership over their time” isn’t going to be easy. The mindspace and freedom to truly be creative is also compromised in the face of such subtle pressures.
Your spouse matters!
While researching for this article, I spoke to some of friends, three men and eight women in their late 20s and early 30s, some of whom grew up in a rural background and others in an urban setting, all of them from currently in educated, upper-middle class background. I chose make my conversations diverse. Some people I spoke to were freelance artists, some people who I knew indulged in a hobby from time to time, such as a man who writes a fiction blog and a woman who posts new recipes she comes up with on a common WhatsApp group, and others, whose creative life I knew nothing about. Some of them are single, others are married without kids, still others negotiating toddlers and a full-time job. I asked both men and women the same set of questions, as part of a conversation.
I started by asking them if they considered themselves creative people, and if so, in what manner they thought their creativity was expressed best. All my respondents thought that they were creative people! Except for two people, one who spoke about the creative aspects of writing code at work, and another person who makes art for a living, everybody else spoke about creativity in the context of a personal activity, like a hobby or within the context of daily life. Being guided by the data, I will mainly explore creativity in the personal sphere in the last part of the article.
It turns out that people consider themselves creative in a variety of ways: writing, art, dancing and baking, yes, but also music, make-up and apartment décor. One response, from Indhumati, a stay-at-home mom, was “making up new games to keep my toddler busy!” When I let people define their creative space, I sensed greater freedom in the conversation and people opened up about their joy in making something original. I was curious about the relationship between available time and creative freedom. I asked them a few questions about time: how long they spent on a creative task and how often, how long they needed to roll ideas around in their head before getting it out there, and how they managed their time overall, with particular emphasis on household tasks.
From these (low-sample) conversations, people, both men and women, who spoke enthusiastically about their creative freedom seemed to be the same people who spoke about happy marriages and a spouse who doesn’t turn their nose up at housework. As simple as that! The wisdom espoused by the likes of Sheryl Sandberg and Anne-Marie Slaughter seems to hold up – your spouse matters for your creative success.
When I asked them how long they would be comfortable being away from a hypothetical six-year-old child to go to a conference to talk about their ideas, or pursue a work opportunity that would afford them greater creative freedom, men (all in their late 20s, in fields as diverse as advertising, science and software engineering) reported that they would be fine staying away from their family for two or three months. Women, on the other hand, mostly said that they would stay away a month at the most, and that too “not without mommy guilt”. Interestingly, from my conversations, I observed that the duration of time a woman was comfortable staying away from her family seemed to be proportional to how “equal” their household was or how much familial support they had.
Sharing housework can no longer be something that is negotiable. While most modern households are indeed moving towards equal sharing of responsibilities, some tasks inevitably fall on women, such as weekly grocery shopping, cleaning the fridge, folding clothes, planning lunch-box meals and driving their kids to various activities. Shakuntala, a stay-at-home mom in her early thirties who also performs and teaches music from time to time, said that her husband is more than capable of managing the house and kids, and when he set about doing a task, he did a really good job. The thing was, she rued, he still needed to be reminded. She had to remember to remind him to take care of this task or that! “Doesn’t it strike him when he sees that the laundry bag is full, that he could just do a load?” she asked. Of the three men I spoke to, the two married men confirmed this trend in their households. Vikram, 30, said that “it had never crossed my mind until this conversation that this could also be work!” Both Vikram and his wife have a creative mindset, but clearly, their time is divided unequally. If creativity takes time, these “soft-tasks” really eat into them.
Most people, men and women, reported being at their creative peak when they were single and working, just after college. However, two women, who are remarkably pleased with their creative progress, said that being married and having kids actually helped them to get more creative! “I know I have lesser time now,” says Anasuya, whose baby is six months old, and who just got back to full time work, “and I make sure I squeeze the most out of it!” “I’m so happy,” said Priyamvada, recently married, who writes. “I think it shows in my work!”
Creative drive
My best lessons from these conversations came in response to a question when I asked people to remember and describe their most creative periods. Some women were wistful, longing for times in the past when, they said, they had felt really free. Some spoke about mental blocks and how they had overcome them. But very few women talked about an enduring creative drive, something that went beyond the vicissitudes and vagaries of life. Malavika, a software engineer-turned-artist in her 20s, described how she had identified her creative urge during a particular time in her life, and since then, can’t remember any time when her creative drive was not in overdrive. She freelances as an artist, working at least 12 hours a day, including weekends. “I try to put a bit of myself into everything I do. I never stopped doing something creative,” she says enthusiastically.
How happy a woman must be when she can proudly say that she never stops doing something creative! When we create, we find ourselves. It is perhaps the highest pleasure that is available to us as human beings. Such a human endeavor should not be the exclusive prerogative of one gender, now, should it? It’s not fair that people of one gender be more creative, more happy, more human, at the expense of the other gender.
So while the creative abilities of a woman in today’s age seems to be just fine, maybe what is important is her own creative mindspace and time: to fly, to soar, to find herself. As our priorities as a society change, our family and social dynamics will change as well, and hopefully, it would facilitate our evolution towards being more creatively realized creatures.
