Armed with an undergraduate degree in engineering, an MBA from IIM-Calcutta and the unstinted support of her tiger mom, Malini Parmar spent her 20s and early 30s climbing the “greasy corporate ladder”, as she calls it. Eighteen-hour workdays and travel four days a week were all par for the course at the IT major she worked in, compensated for by a salary that allowed her to spend on whatever she wanted, whether it was parties or a holiday to Peru. When she hit her mid-30s, she decided she was not married.
“I knew, even when I was 26, that adoption was how I wanted to build a family though I had no thoughts about marriage then,” says Parmar, at the office of Stonesoup, the waste management startup in Bengaluru she founded after quitting her lucrative job in IT. The 45-year-old is now a single mother of two girls she adopted from Odisha, who tell her “she is the best”. Parmar says she has always been dating and continues to do so, but when a proposal crops up, she weighs whether she would be happier single and married.
In Delhi, 29-year-old Kanika Tekriwal, too, is hard at work smashing multiple stereotypes. Her Marwari family expected Tekriwal to follow convention by getting married and having children. But they had not reckoned with the ambitions of Tekriwal who, at the age of 16, was using the business acumen usually associated with her community to launch her own aviation enterprise. “With a 20-hour workday, I don’t have the time or inclination for a relationship,” says the founder of Jetsetgo, India’s largest private plane charter platform with 24 aircraft exclusively on its platform and access to another 80 from various sources.
Rewriting The Playbook
In a country obsessed with marriage, the single woman had long been considered an anomaly. If she was below a certain age, the family’s collective energies would be devoted to getting her married. If she was older, a divorcee or a widow, she would be slighted, particularly during religious ceremonies where she would be considered inauspicious. “People tend to consider single women as incomplete or of dubious character,” says Binita Parikh, a 44-year-old communications professional based in Ahmedabad, who is currently working on a book on single (or independent, as she calls) working women in cities.
But this is 2018, and there is an increasing cohort of single, working women in our cities, who are unwilling to let their lives be dictated by norms set generations ago and have been liberated by the salaries they earn. Data illustrates the rise of the single Indian woman. In 2001, there were 51.2 million single women in theIn 2001, there were 51.2 million single women in the country. By 2011, this had leapt to 71.4 million, according to census figures. A Newsweek cover story back in the 1970s spoke of being single in the US: “…singlehood has emerged as an intensely ritualised — and newly respectable — style of American life. It is finally becoming possible to be both single and whole.” While that might take a while in India, the foundation is being laid.
Travel blogger Shivya Nath, who quit her full-time corporate job to see the world and now earns her living by writing about it in her blog, explains why she doesn’t want to get married. “I think it’s so important to question archaic traditions, and think about why we are doing what we are doing and if it is worth our money and time. It’s incredibly liberating to be an independent woman, who is responsible for herself financially and doesn’t need to rely on anyone else to make her choices,” says the 29-yearold, who has explored Guatemala and Ethiopia, among a host of countries. “The battle to fight patriarchal mindsets in India is a tough one, but every woman must be encouraged to fight it till she find her own bliss.”
Even for those women who want to get married, they do not view it as a race. “Sometimes, due to the external environment, you are under a lot of pressure to just get married. But with time you realise that if you have waited this long, you can wait a little moreand do it when you are happy about it,” says Mamta Sawhney, a 38-year-old Delhi resident, who is the vice-president of an NBFC startup. “I’ve seen so many marriages falling apart. So the notion that all people are happy after marriage is not correct either.”
For designer Ritu Ganguli, it is the freedom that comes with singlehood that she prizes above everything else. “You get to take your own calls. If I want to do something, I can just drop everything and do it, which is important for me as an artist,” says the 35-year-old. The Bengaluru resident, who graduated in languages and philosophy, experimented quite a bit with her career, punctuating it with breaks to study design. “My decisions do not hinge on anyone else,” says Ganguli, who plans to do a PhD in design.
Sumaa Tekur, a spiritual healer with her own firm, Golden Swan Healing, couldn’t agree more. “I love my single status. I try not to take it for granted. It’s amazing to be free but also responsible for oneself,” says the 39-yearold. Her only grouse? That marketers don’t seem to make products for households of one. “I don’t like to buy family packs of everything!”
Rise of a Consumer Class
Marketers are not entirely blind to this turning tide. According to a report from management consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG) , there are perceptible shifts in India’s social structure and these changes could catalyse the emergence of a large number of single women, with their own incomes and spending plans. “From 2001 through 2011, the average age at marriage rose from 22.6 to 28 for men and from 18.3 to 22.2 for women,” the report points out. “During that period, the number of single women over the age of 20 increased by 40%. So far, this remains largely a big-city phenomenon, but it has started percolating down to tier-2 cities.”
Abheek Singhi, BCG’s managing director, reckons that the purchasing power has also grown significantly in the last few years. “Women, especially single, are now influencing purchase decisions in typically male-centric markets such as automobiles and real estate,” he says.
As this market evolves, it could take some cues from China, where companies and marketers are tailoring strategies and campaigns to target a burgeoning market for single women — across categories such as fashion and apparel and personal care. While the Indian market may be some way away from reaching this size (Singhi reckons that despite the rise in the number of single women, the number of those who are working remains low), a foundation has been laid for more companies to target this emerging demographic.
According to Pinakiranjan Mishra, national leader, retail and consumer products, EY, the growing heft of women, including those who are single, can be seen in women-centric launches, the latest being the rollout of Jane Walker, the female version of Diageo’s iconic logo Johnnie Walker. “Even across categories such as footwear and apparel, the gender mix is changing and women consumers added will outnumber men,” he contends. Single urban women, with grow ing independence and incomes, could be a key target market for these products. “Women have traditionally been a neglected market, the arrival of free-spending single women will compel companies to change this outlook,” he adds.
The power of half a billion
Women at Work: Engaging, retaining and nurturing women in the workforce is now not just a diversity agenda, but a deep business imperative. It is not just women who need this, but India needs its women to participate more vigorously for the economy to grow to the full potential.
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