‘How do I stop feeling like a diversity hire?’
This is a question many women ponder at some point in their career, a little because of imposter syndrome, sometimes it’s the vibe of the workplace and very often it’s about the doubt that you might have been hired to fill a category, which stems from the conditioning that you have to justify your presence at a workplace. Harnidh Kaur understands this anxiety and tries to name it in her book The Girls Are Not Fine: The Cost of Ambition, Careers and Becoming.
Harnidh Kaur is a writer, poet, lawyer, and cultural critic with an aspirational professional trajectory, across writing, startups, funding and elite educational spaces, and this becomes relevant for the ideas she brings to life in her first non-fiction book.
Kaur starts the book with a declaration, “my experiences are data points, not the main plot.”. It is a necessary acknowledgement for a book that begins with the author’s personal experiences, before extending them into an argument about women more broadly. Her personal anecdotes reveal how social structures feel from up close. However, the problem comes when her individual experiences are treated as universal. Whose experiences are being used to construct this “we” here?
A recurring thought Kaur presents is that girls are trained to perform a certain ‘fine-ness’ right from childhood. She writes, “doesn’t appear out of nowhere, it’s baked into how girls are raised, how women are evaluated and how we’re allowed to show up in public.” However, Kaur’s answers on how to deal with that pressure to perform ‘fine-ness’ often returns to individual choices that are accessible to women in the same socio-economic freedom as the author herself.
Advice, but is it applicable?
Written in four parts, each addressing a different kind societal pressure: how workplaces antagonise the woman who simply asks and negotiates her share of work, the expectation of being a ‘low-maintenance girlfriend’, how the concept of fifty-fifty in a domestic setup between genders is never a fair deal, what should be a fallback for those facing the burnout from trying to keep up with these expectations. Kaur’s advice to the young female readers is as simple as it can get: Say no, ask for more, stop being low-maintenance, become financially independent, build a support system, leave friendships that do not serve you anymore, among other things. However, even with her awareness, Kaur falters in exploring how any of the advice is actually applicable, and the conditions in which it could go wrong.
A lot of this advice is very much gender neutral and not necessarily bad. Having an emergency fund in savings is timely advice for anyone in their twenties, in India especially. A woman that is desperate to land or keep a job does not necessarily need advice on salary negotiation, a woman who treats her social network as an asset for future employment opportunities or as a step forward to raise her social capital cannot treat those friendships as something that can be walked out of because it no longer ‘serves’ her. Kaur’s advice to walk away from friendships that might not be available to take your calls at 3am measures emotional bonds against material utilities. Not every friendship is equally ‘useful’ at every stage of life. Life happens to everybody, and choosing to remain through tough periods of life where one friend needs more support than they can return is what sustains friendships in adulthood.
Who gets to say no?
Kaur then goes on to explain why boundaries are necessary, especially between family members and at the workplace. Though Kaur’s book does not explore the idea that recognising a need to establish boundaries and having the agency to enforce them are two different things. The Indian girls are indeed not fine, and a lot of them are painstakingly aware of that. What is unevenly distributed amongst the girls is the ability to solve the problem, because recognising the problem and considering it a norm is the easier part.
Kaur’s book is about saying ‘no’. Women are often expected to explain their refusals, their no is rarely treated as a complete sentence. Kaur’s advocacy to normalise limiting the explanations after a no goes only as long as there are no active repercussions that affect their careers. The interesting contradiction is that Kaur is aware that women who refuse will be branded ‘difficult’ or ‘aggressive’. Therefore, the book stands with a confusion to decide which side to push more: A no is a full sentence or that no might punish you. All the while ignoring the question: who can even afford to say no to those deadlines and extra workload?
The Gap between the Book and Its Reader
For a book that is promoted as a guidebook for the women navigating life in their twenties, it assumes its reader is an urban, well-educated, aware, and professionally forward woman with some degree of economic and social freedom. The author herself fits this criteria and she acknowledges her privilege in the beginning of the book itself, but the same assumptions about what a woman can do remains between the lines of her work.
Kaur’s advice to attain financial independence is valuable, and it’s an age-old wisdom passed down from earlier feminist thinkers like Woolf, Volga, and Simone De Beauvoir among others. Though there are very few instances where the difference between financial independence as a personal vanity and a case where needing an income is to survive are defined, and Kaur continuously treats it more as the former than latter.
The more pressing concern here is, whether all these observations needed to become a full-length non-fiction book?
Careers have fallbacks, boundaries are important, women do more unpaid domestic labour, financial independence allows you agency in life, these are important things to talk about. But there’s hardly any novelty in these arguments. These themes and versions of them have been explored by feminist writers, bloggers, online communities around the world for years now. The common point being, the distance between the ones who are actively discussing these and the ones who actually need to hear these remains a pertinent issue, shaped by differences in digital literacy, access and the acceptance of patriarchy as a norm in their lives. Harnidh Kaur’s The Girls Are Not Fine does not offer much advice to bridge that gap.
The end result is a 350 plus pages self-help book with a promising premise, telling women their exhaustion, ambitions, burnouts are not individual failures, but are something so many others are feeling as well. The book has enough material to present itself as relatable for every female reader, lets readers underline sentences when you recognise yourselves in these pages, and it stops at just that. With names and metaphors like ‘fuck-you fund’ for emergency savings, and ‘burnout bench’ for your close friend circle tries to portray old ideas as new arguments.
The girls are indeed not fine, but Kaur’s advice is not applicable to all the girls who are not.
‘The Girls Are Not Fine: The Cost of Ambition, Careers, and Becoming’ by Harnidh Kaur is published by Penguin India.
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