‘Women Can’t Drive’ Might Just Be True
‘Women can’t drive’. If I’d collected a Rupee for every time I’d heard that…well, I’d always have enough change in my wallet. I grew up seeing my mother drive more than my father. My masis drive, my sister drives. So imagine my surprise when on the first day of driving school, on successfully starting and driving the car a few meters, the instructor looked at me in disbelief. ‘Most girls cannot get the hang of releasing the clutch slowly. How did you do that so smoothly?’ What a weirdo, I thought.
Every time I try to parallel park the car, I’m offered help. Once when I attempted to park in a tight spot, the parking guy indicated that I should park ahead in an easier spot. I refused to, and obstinately parked in the difficult spot - at one go. He came to me grinning - ‘Madam, haath saaf hai aapka’ (you’re seasoned at this). What a creep, I thought.
Recently I drove a friend’s car during peak traffic hours when the city was flooded. I was dropping a colleague too. In answer to his repeated enquiries on if I’d be able to manage, I informed him that I’d been driving for over a decade. In about 20 minutes, he eased into his seat, proclaiming me a good driver - amongst girls. This from a guy who didn’t even know how to drive. ‘I’m scared of encountering women drivers on the road, which is why I didn’t learn myself,’ he joked. How underexposed, I thought.
Last weekend, as my friend and I took an Uber, we started making conversation with the driver. ‘How does this seat belt rule for people in the back make sense, bhaiya?’, my friend asked, ‘This is all after the Cyrus Mistry case, but that happened on the highway, not on these congested city streets.’ The driver had a prompt response. ‘Who knows about that bhaiya. But the actual problem is that this Cyrus guy let a woman drive on the highway. What did he expect would happen?’ My friend gave me a sheepish look as my eyebrows shot up. I chose to remain quiet. But the driver did not. As he proceeded with his elaborate opinion on how women just cannot handle highway roads, I snapped. ‘My mother drives on the highway, and quite well,’ I told him sharply. He dismissed me immediately - ‘Let it be madam, no woman can drive at that speed properly. However skilled, ladkiyan darti hain'. What an absolute idiot, I thought.
I seethed in the back seat, waiting for the journey to end, so I could disembark from his sexist vehicle. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that parts of it were true. I myself have had to help many women park their cars. I’ve also seen women struggle with manual gears. I don’t know a single woman who drives rashly, but I know many men who do. Meanwhile, my 10 year old nephew can easily steer the wheel seated on someone’s lap (something I’ve seen many boys his age do). Women start their driving journey with fear, men start it with confidence.
In another classic example of how everything masculine is glorified, bringing shame to the gender who may not exhibit the same skill is commonplace. No one knows if women are genuinely not good at driving. Surely there are no proven studies regarding this. I do agree that there is an inherent fear in women that makes them hesitant drivers in many situations. But where did this fear come from? Is it the fear that arises out of breaking out from norms, being the minority in something that was traditionally male-dominated in our society? Is it having had little to no role models to demonstrate how easy driving is? It might just be. I imagine that if we glorified traditionally female things, and shamed men who could not match up, they’d feel some pressure too.
Something else to mull over - is the fear also present as a desperate need to avoid making ‘women can’t drive’ a self-fulfilling prophecy? We hear it all our lives. It makes us overly conscious of messing up. If a man scratches his car, people will discuss what happened. When a woman does the same, they will discuss who was driving. Just as my Uber driver did. The one I thought was an idiot, remember?