Jeet Kaul: I'm Jeet. I was born in Srinagar, India and I spent a good chunk of my childhood there. I moved to Bay area to work in tech 30 years ago. That's what I've been doing, been married also for 30 years, to a very amazing, wonderful woman, confident, adventurous, and I have boys and girls, so I have a very wonderful family and work environment that's all I do.

Madhumita Sowndararajan: Hi everyone, my name is Madhumita. I live in the East Bay, with my husband, and our four legged daughter, Eva. She's an Australian cattle dog we adopted her last year and then 2020 happened so honestly we're so glad that we adopted her. I think she's made our 2020 a tad bit easier. I work for an SF based tech company, as an HR professional so in my capacity as an HR professional, I work on a lot of initiatives that relate to diversity and inclusion initiatives. So this topic is definitely very close to my heart, and outside of work, music is a big passion and I pursue music. I play a musical instrument, give local performances here in the Bay Area. So very excited to be here as part of this podcast and sharing my thoughts on this important topic so thank you Maitri for this opportunity.

Jagannath Padmanabhan: Hi everyone, my name is Jagan, I'm a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford plastic surgery. I grew up in Bhubaneswar, India, and I moved to the US about 10 years ago. I've been living in the Bay Area now for four years, with my wife, Vaishali. She works at UCSF Gladstone institutes, so at UCSF. I just want to start off by saying that I've been learning more about the work that the team at maitri does, it's really fantastic really important work. So congratulations to you and your whole team for the work you do. I'm no domain expert on the topic but I'm here to participate as an involved community member and here to learn as well. Thank you so much for having me on the show.

JP: I can speak to that… so I grew up in Odisha, where we have English medium schools where all the teaching and instruction is done in English and then we have Odia schools where the local language Odia is used for all instructions. The English schools were more sought after, more expensive. So that was the social norm there. Now there is an issue with prioritizing English over the local language but that's for another day. But given the situation, I was friends with these two people, a brother and sister. Their family was under some financial constraints and they, at that point, had decided to send the boy who was my classmate to an English school and a sister to an Odia school. And the logic was that the boy will use his education to get forward and the girl would not, and I remember that being very shocking that led me to think that this must have been a very difficult decision for the parents, but at the end of the day, the decision was led by a thinking that the boys’ education was more important than the girls’ education. And this type of thinking was there in you know different forms at different stages, for example, being career-oriented is always seen as a positive trait for the man. For women, it's always seen as, I think, a secondary thing, something you have to do in addition to taking care of family and the kids. So there is an undercurrent of that, that I saw in even some progressive families, which I think is one example of the gender based norms that I have faced growing up in India. I think there are some things that do become better in the Bay Area, but some of the undercurrent underlying thinking remains the same, so it's not a problem that is completely solved, even as sometimes we think we have solved the issues into copper, so I think it's very important to be vigilant of these issues, and sort of identify them as an issue explicitly define them and educate ourselves and our friends and our children to be aware of them as and when they keep cropping up.

MS: I think I have something very different from what Jagan has said so it was interesting to hear jagan’s point of view. I did not mention this in my intro, but I grew up in Chennai, in India. So, there have been two norms that I would say that I've observed and faced myself. One is that women as a gender is weaker than the male gender, or you know I can say the other way around where men are expected to be strong so just that associating an attribute of strength to gender is a norm that I've repeatedly seen. And the second one I've observed is women have to know and do certain things by certain age. So these are two things that I have repeatedly seen as a pattern, and to give an example for each so you know on the first one about strength and gender, like any other girl growing up in India, I've been a victim of verbal abuse, sort of a physical abuse, growing up in India because at a very young age I was using public transport. So it's not a problem that's very unique to me. I think every girl in India unfortunately faces things like this. And there was this one point in time where I observed that the group of guys who always used to pass very abusive, sexual comments when I used to come out of the school and walk towards the bus stop or take the bus to go home. And at the beginning I was just saying, okay, I'll just ignore and the problem will go away. I'm not going to give them attention, I'll just do my thing, but it actually didn’t. So at some point in time it got to me, emotionally, mentally, and I went to my mom crying for help. That day, what she said, I think, has made a big difference in how I look at things and it's made me a lot more confident as a woman, and she said, and of course I'm paraphrasing, and she said two things. One is, when you have threats outside and once you face threats outside, you don't have to rely just on your physical strength. It can also be your mental strength and smartness, and she said that because I was a very small, petite-figured back then, so they claimed my confidence, so she made that point. The second point she also made was, you know, when you face threats outside, don't show your fear, show your confidence. So she says that next time these guys continue to pass on the comments, take your shoes in your hand, you can show them what you're capable of. Retrospectively as I think about those things, it made a big difference in me because, as a community, we tend to think women being the weaker sex need protection, they have to be protected so here as a mom, she could have easily taken the solution of saying, oh my god, the world out there is very dangerous. So from now on, I'm going to drop you and pick you up from school, very easy solution right I didn't have to go through any of those mental torture, but she chose the second way to say I'm here to support you. You have to be self-sufficient. So that made a big difference in me, built a lot of confidence in me to say, okay, I can take care of myself. It's not like I'm weaker. Right, so the confidence was a big thing and this and what it also manifested later was when actually later I saw men were like groping women in public transport and all of that I was willing to raise my hand to say, come on, these guys have to be kicked out of the bus, because they're doing something. So when I did that a few times, I noticed, other men and women also raised their hands and said yes we noticed too, these guys have to be kicked out, so it's happened quite a few times so that made me realize that there is the aspect of allyship and support is so important here. So I think that has stayed very strongly with me, and the second norm I was referring to, I think, which will also lead me to your second part of the question, Nandini, is women having to know and do certain things by certain age. This particular norm I've seen it both in India and in the US, it's not changed in my opinion. I've had many people ask me at various points in time whether it's in the US, or in India is oh you don't know how to tire sari, how old are you, from a brahmin community, and I've jokingly asked I mean is knowing to tie a sari a qualification to be married, to be a married woman, and in fact I've heard it more here, South Asian communities here in the US. And in some sense I feel like when we move away from our home country and from our homes, the tradition, the cultural values that we've grown up with we somehow hold on to it much more closely than our friends-family-counterparts in India because we think that's our identity. So in some sense for us here, time has frozen. And back in India, they're actually probably moving in a lot of cases a lot more power than what I've noticed in communities here in the US.

JK: My experiences are going to be different, they are generationally different from you Jagan and Madhu and probably slightly culturally different. It was important when I grew up that, and I think my parents' generation actually did a lot of change, have made a lot of adjustments, because of which, things got a lot better not great but better than they were before. My sister was expected to have a professional career. It was an expected thing from her just as much as me, she was supposed to do good in school, as much as I was supposed to do that, although she does tell me that I am my mom's favorite child so I don't know about that, but I'm sure she's experienced some differences. The gender stuff that gets stuck in your head would be around women have to do all the cooking and the washing the dishes and washing the clothes. You know men work, and listen to sports, you know TV was not that common when I grew up, so there was no watching the sports then. Reaction as, Nandini, you said about divorce, very negative but the burden of that was on women. It was never on men at all. It was please, you go in and you just take it, and keep the family together entirely on them, and big family discussions, and when I say discussions I mean heated discussions, you would see that men were meant to be talking and the men would just have to kind of share their thoughts with their spouse, if women provided any kind of an opposing opinion, it was kind of looked down upon. That's generally what you know growing up looked to me before I went to college. I spent some time in Delhi. That's when I actually experienced what mother was talking about and I have an interesting anecdote on this one. Kind of gives a view, again this is decades ago, remember some things didn't change. I was in line in a bus, there was a queue but when the bus was late for a couple hours everybody ran to jump in, I did too. There’s like gazillion people just trying to climb in and there was a woman in front of me, and some as ever climbed because you know there were people in the right, left, that somebody must have done something she turned around and the only face she saw was me. And she slapped me. And I was like, wow, so I was new in Delhi, those days, I was shocked. I was thinking, oh shoot, I don't want to go in the bus. But I was late, so I had to go in the bus I went in and I sat down as I was just extremely ashamed. I hadn't done anything but you know, it looked awful. There was a person who sat next to me, an older gentleman. And he said, look at that girl, slapped some poor guy has no manners. He didn't recognize me, but he knew the woman he made a comment on the woman. I was not the cause, somebody else was not the cause, it was her fault. And you know that stuck with me this is me talking about this like that was awful as often, and coming to bay area and that's, you know, my experiences are some in Houston, and most of everything in Bay Area is a lot different. A good chunk of community that I interact with women are professional women, they have a different view of life, and it's a you know it's a very different kind of construct here. And because we are all here, adjusting to a very different kind of life, people walk away from some of the structures that exist, but one thing. And this again this is about 30 years ago, with me and I did not like and I did not engage in those kinds of gatherings at all, we used to as a community get together in each other's homes, a large group you know be like 10-15 families we would eat and talk about it. And I remember going to one of those in one of my good friend's home and I entered with my wife, the women were in another room completely and men were in one room. My wife and I just when we are gathering together, we were hanging together. That's not who she is. So, she sat with me in that room with no women, and it felt odd. It's the entire, you know, few hours is incredibly odd. Now, you know, people congregate together, men and women talk about different things, kinda make sense but it felt to me very awkward because in any other setting, any other non-South Asian setting, this doesn't happen. There's a natural congregation, maybe the men do get together but generally this mix and this back and forth happening. I also experienced, I had acquaintances, I have friends who had friends. There was a norm of spousal abuse. I remember hearing that and we had to kind of do something in the friend circle. You know I would think it would happen in India and not here but I was just shocked that the ability that somebody here would actually go in and feel free to hit their spouse was actually, and this is 25 years ago so I just, you know, that completely just surprised me. So I'm hoping I have not experienced that now. I don't hear about a lot of that now in my circle but if this was very cool, this was the childhood friend and his friend. This is like a, you know, one degree of separation.

MS: Hey, Jeet, can I ask you a quick question. I think you shared very interesting parts and given, like you said, you know, that we come from a defense for lack of better word generation. How do you see these things have changed with, you know, your boys, your girls, not just within your family but the perspectives outside in the community? So as Jagan and I are talking as individuals, it'll be interesting to kind of know how you see it as a parent.

JK: So I have boys and girls, it's been very interesting. My wife and I have kind of decided to just raise them, not in a very traditional way, so they are growing up as American as you can get. The part that was very interesting to me was, I want you to know that I have to sit and struggle with the idea, right, there are things that men just do including me and you know in my early youth right you sit back and you think you behave a certain way. And hopefully, you are becoming better and better person. The thing that really was very interesting to me was, my son was a teenager, and he was very interested in a girl in the class, and they were friends, and he wanted to ask her out. And, as a parent, without thinking too much I said well you know you should just ask her out and his comment was, I do not want to put her in any uncomfortable position. If she makes the move that will be better. And I was just delighted with an answer that showed how short-sighted and limited thinking I had. And I think that norm of how men interact with the men was hard because I haven't seen that growing up at all, right, stories, or movies is very different. So, you know, it's not that we haven't taught these kids, I think we just tell them you just study, be a good person. I will promise you haven't taught him how to interact, we just have seen you know, treat people well, and this answer was the best answer I could expect from my son and my girls, right, have experienced you know stupid stuff as girls, unfortunately, have experienced for centuries right so they get that and they come in and, you know, sometimes share with me, sometimes choose not to. But my boy is younger than my girls, much younger, so they think there is a shift. I feel there is a shift.

JK: I would say yes, that again, my, as I said that generationally I'm older. So, the things are I hope better, a little bit, maybe not a lot. The expectation, right, so I know firsthand in my extended family. If the woman does not know how to cook it started as mockery, denigration, and eventually went into abuse. Now, it's possible that the male involved was of that mindset, was of that thinking, but there was a license to do it, because there are these expectations that the woman has to do these things and if the woman can't do these things well, then it's her fault. Now again, I'm using women and men because that's the stuff I've seen so I think there is a somewhat of a link between gender norms that are expected and abuse that gets perpetrated because of them.

JP: Yeah, I agree with that, you know, traditional gender roles and characteristics like the man earning the bread and the woman taking care of the kids, maybe are hangover from the hunter gatherer days is not adequate for the modern world. That stereotype again may be embraced by some couples, really, and that's great. But when the stereotype does not work for a couple and there is societal pressure for the woman to fit in a certain type of rule or personality, and when this is enforced by the man who is by social gender norms, the dominant gender that starts becoming a, you know, oppressive patriarchy. And I think that kind of a situation will lead, unfortunately, would naturally lead to gender abuse. So the expectation that you know gender norms will feel like the natural world order is unjust to everyone, but especially to the women. And here I think it's also important to remember gender at the end of the day is a social construct, a useful construct, but something we have made up in our minds and as a society. So, in graduate school I remember I had this professor explain on how gender is a very fluid thing. Male and female are indefined points on a spectrum of genders so forcing gender norms, which inherently have an undercurrent of power inequality between the male and female will inevitably, I think, lead to oppression and abuse.

MS: Yeah, I think I agree with what Jagan and Jeet have mentioned and if I can just little bit extend on what Jagan has mentioned, I feel like the concept of having norms, itself, for a society is not bad because I think it builds some structure it does give some structure and for society to operate you need some structure. But I think the problem comes when those norms don't change with time. And when those norms are forcefully if I can say “templatized” so what I mean is, we have certain gender norms they say okay a woman has to be XYZ, a man has to be ABC. And then we kind of force that onto a person so that person is not XYZ, then you begin to judge them, you know, and you force them saying, oh you are something else you have to be XYZ so go fit into that template. And I think that's where the problem comes. And the second thing is also constantly thinking about okay these norms, to Jagan’s point, may have made sense 40 years ago, 50 years ago. The fact that women stayed back, man was the breadwinner made sense 40-50 years ago because families were big, they were more kids so you know at some somewhere as a, as a family unit or as a society we said okay we have to divide and conquer the responsibility so one person goes, one person stays but maybe it made sense in that era, but if you're going to take the same norms and say okay in the 21st century the same thing has to apply and I won't change my norms with time, that's where the problem comes, so I think we have to constantly keep evolving and being up to date with a function of time. I think it is extremely critical here.

JP: I absolutely agree with that because that would just be another form of---

MS: Exactly, totally, and in this case we are still templatizing, right, and still saying, that as a woman, you have to do XYZ, but if a woman doesn't do XYZ you begin to judge so I think it's a different kind of a problem.

JK: Let me kind of talk about things that neither, so my wife has worked on and off. She freelanced, there was a time she and I were both working in a startup and she came home one day she said, kids need more time and she quit. And she stayed home with it, that freedom, to be able to make a call when to work, when not to work is important. What we did, interestingly enough, and we made this call really early in our marriage, she does the finances in our home. Now I started, I was the first person you know and I started, I was doing the money thing. And I remember this mindset where, you know, I would watch my mom you know asking my dad saying hey I need this money and he would kind of dole out and have some conversation. I didn't like that dynamic I, you know, it was okay, there was nothing wrong in that, I just didn't like it so we switch a couple of core behaviors, so she does the money, she manages expenditure, what needs to be done, she owns the accounts everything. I do laundry. We both do dishes. We both cook, depending on time. So that swap of things that are generally you know I don't know, traditionally, you think it's not just in South Asian families but even here in the West, that norm breaking is kind of important. Now my kids expect me to do laundry, they will come to me and say okay you know are my clothes ready? And I'm hoping that that mindset changes because I think it's important and I will give you my work experience, my first real job was at Apple, and this is 1989 a long long long time ago. And there were not a lot of women in the company. I was probably one of three or four South Asian people in the company. My boss was a woman; her boss was a woman. I had a very good colleague, a woman colleague, an engineer, and having that thing so early in my career, I do have to credit my mom and my sister for changing my thinking, but it was very important to see women in power. So seeing women in this way changes, I'm sure right I'm sure that changed my thinking about the women at work completely. I think breaking these norms in society, whether it's at home or at work is so foundationally important, it's not just for women to see other women, it's for men to see other women in that role. You know, it's very important to me that in a very competitive tech market, you have to be very aggressive in pushing your career, you have to be that. You have to want it, you have to ask for it, you have to push it, and almost always women who get into those roles are seen differently than men. Men are seen ambitious and women are not seen ambitious. So it's been very important for me over the years to be able to see and support women in those roles and it's not easy even today. You want to be able to say that, 30, years ago when I saw these women and really strong powerful roles that Apple that 30 years later things would be easy and I can tell you that it's not easy even today. And you have to actively work to change the thinking and having women in power is important, so that it changes, right. I don't know how to talk about what else to do but I'm just giving you a glimpse of my view on home and work.

MS: If I have to break this question into maybe three levels, right, what we can do as an individual, what we can do, you know, wherever we all work, places of our work, and what we can do as a community. So I think, at an individual level, it's very important I think to be aware of our biases, we call it the unconscious bias, it's easier said than done, but I also don't think it's impossible to do. I think I consider myself lucky I've had the luxury of discussing these things with my husband, Vignesh, sometimes we actually catch each other in our own biases. For example, I have been honestly in situations when I've seen women quitting their careers because they have family responsibilities, it's kind of my pet peeve, if I can say that, in some sense you know I begin to question why are women doing this, like, why should they do this? I start to ask all these questions and Vignesh kind of steps in and possibly says, maybe it's their choice right. So as I was talking about my idea of templatized, he's caught me, saying maybe you are templatizing, you know, so just take a pause and I've done the same to him. So I think it's very important at an individual level to be open to people pointing out maybe you're biased and be open to thinking oh maybe I am and how can I change that, so I think that's very core and fundamental. And I think one way to kind of solve for that is taking the effort to surround ourselves with people who are very different from ourselves, because if we only surround ourselves with people who are similar to us, there is a concept in psychology, I think we call it, echo chambers. Basically, if you have people who think very similar to you and think exactly the way you are, they just echo your thoughts, so you don't get the opportunity to widen your perspectives. I think at an individual level that's very key, and at a work level, given my profession, this is something that I very very actively work on. One thing that's very important to Jeet’s point to do is constantly think about where can we be an ally and not being afraid to change the status quo so if it means that you're in a work meeting, and a colleague is making some gender based conclusions or comments, call them out, it's very important to do that. And the second thing to do is also to ask some very thoughtful questions, right, you can always ask questions like, have we looked at all the data? What might we be overlooking or what more information would you need to change your belief, so the more these kinds of open questions when we ask it opens up the door for discussions at work and you are not subconsciously controlling something because of someone's gender, and when I say gender, it doesn't have to be male or female, it can be like we just discussed some time ago, gender need not be binary. And at a community level I think we should focus on more allyship, by more listening and engaging conversation, exactly like what we're doing now, and not vehemently proving your point, it's not going to take us anywhere if we are focused on one side is wrong and one side is right. I think we have to walk to the middle ground, and the only way to do it is actually listening and engaging in conversations. And in this context, I also want to share something that I recently read in this book called, The person You Mean To Be where they talk about a 20-60-20 rule. So when you're talking about bringing people along, you know, bringing allies with you for a cause, it’s always assumed that there are going to be 20% of the population on the left, who are not going to agree with you, and there are going to be 20% population on the right, who will agree with you. So, the key thing to focus on is that middle 60, how can you sway that middle 60 to the right, and not focus on getting the entire population because that's practically impossible. So I think this was a really good framework that I've learned in the recent past. As I'm talking to somebody really thinking about, are you falling in that left 20, or are you falling in the middle 60, then I can put as much effort to get you along. So I think these are my thoughts in terms of how as a community, we can take some accountability and challenging gender norms.

JP: I completely agree with Madhu and Jeet on this, I think this is probably the most important question, what can we do differently as a generation? I think in our families, we should acknowledge and educate our friends and children about gender norms and issues as they grow up. I think identifying these issues, explicitly, will prepare all of us to address them. And I think this is where the role of men comes in, we have to be the champions of equality as well, men have to join the call for the women to fight the unjust and now that is, I think, a fundamental part of this movement and for this to be a real change. I think we should also remember that equity doesn't mean equality, you know, even if everyone forgets about these traditional gender norms today and starts treating boys and girls as equal, we still have work to do to bridge the gap that has already been created because of all the opportunities that were made unavailable to them and I think in terms of helping bridging this gap or the one thing I can think of is the role of seeking male role models, I can elaborate with an example from science. So my wife, surely, is a scientist because today but when she grew up, she did not have any famous, you know, role models for women scientists. I mean yes there was Mary Curie, but not a very relatable example someone she knows personally or she's seen and talked to, and this is true of all of us, when we think of a scientist we automatically think of absent-minded male professor and Albert Einstein, which is not wrong, but not having role models, really does a disservice to women I think. It was much harder for Vaishali to be able to imagine and create a career as a scientist, than it was for me to do the same, and we both grew up in similar communities. But I think now that she's become one she can serve as a relatable role model for the next generation, for the next aspiring girl in the family or community growing up a female scientist will no longer be an unrelatable idea of just one of the several careers she can choose from. And I think that's really something. Every small success in this field, this video of reversing gender norms creates this positive feedback loop. So I wonder if that's the way to use the example of successful women around this like Madhu and her work, right. Can we talk about them as examples and make that an example out of the successful careers that they've had and chip away at the traditional gender norms and maybe that would contribute to solving the problem?