Justice Manjula Bose was not amused. At a dinner, a male colleague introduced her as “Lady Judge, Mrs Justice Manjula Bose”. “Everyone could see that I am a woman,” says Bose, who has the distinction of being the first woman, along with late Justice Padma Khastogir, to have been elevated to the bench at the Calcutta High Court. “You don’t have to point it out,” she had told the offending colleague at the time. 'How would you like to be introduced as ‘Male Judge Mr So and so?’”

Recalling the incident that took place in the late 1980s when she was at the peak of her career, Bose says, “Not that it was the first time that I heard my gender being mentioned along with my designation. And nor was it the last. And it’s not that the male colleague didn’t mean well. But it reflected a deep-rooted inability to accept a woman in a position of power, something society has always been conditioned to believe was the sole prerogative of the male.”

But this wasn’t the only occasion when she had to confront prejudice. Bose says that the very fact that she was elevated to the bench in 1977, the United Nations International Year of the Woman, was an act of bias. It meant that merit was not the sole basis of the elevation.

That, however, was then. But even today, women who are in senior positions in their respective professions admit that they regularly face myriad forms of discrimination or prejudice not just from their male colleagues but also from society at large.

“I regularly get phone calls from people insisting that I immediately transfer the call to the deputy superintendent of police,” says Krishnakali Lahiri, deputy superintendent of police at the criminal investigation department, West Bengal. And she says that when she informs them that she is, in fact, the DSP, she encounters a range of reactions ? from complete silence on the other end to the more ingenuous, “But you are a woman!”

Nor is the surprise at discovering a woman at the helm of affairs limited only to outsiders. “I am constantly asked the question, ‘Why did you choose to join the police?’ ” While she says, “I cannot really put an embargo on the way people think,” Lahiri nevertheless expresses concern that in Indian society there is still a great deal of curiosity about a policewoman, especially if she is in a senior position. “I can expect it from a child, but adults wondering about the efficiency of a woman police person is cause for concern.”

Other women on top would like to get to the bottom of the matter and analyse why this kind of chauvinism persists even now. Bula Bose, formerly a senior manager at Burn Standard Company Ltd, an undertaking that falls under the Indian government’s ministry of heavy industries and public enterprises, and now a freelance writer, attributes chauvinism at higher levels to competitiveness. “Traditionally, men are not used to seeing women as competition,” she explains. “But as women rise to the top, it gives rise to a feeling of resentment. A woman is now a potential threat to men. And the higher you climb, the more competitive it gets because the space in the pyramid gets narrower and narrower.” In fact, Bose feels that the proverbial “loneliness at the top” is much more applicable to women, because “there are fewer women up there and they often experience a sense of ostracism, similar to how those in a minority situation feel.”

The chauvinism spills over to other areas too. Explains Bose, “Since I am a statistics person, and I worked in the heavy industries sector, these form the subject matter of much of my writing. This and the tone of my writing was deemed so “masculine” that I got letters addressing me as Mr Bula Bose. Even a friend admitted to me that he thought it was a man writing.”

Explains Calcutta-based sociologist Bula Bhadra, “We have deep-rooted notions about the roles each gender plays in society. While ideas about women’s abilities have undergone vast changes with women rising to the top in almost every field, it will take a long time before age-old discriminatory attitudes are completely eradicated, if at all. Societal change does not happen overnight.”

Little wonder that a Bombay-based top executive of a television network was by-passed for a promotion to a job that required budgeting skills ? supposedly a “masculine” skill. “I was overlooked, even though I was much more competent for the job,” says the woman in question, who did not wish to be named.

The prejudice is not limited to a woman’s perceived ability to perform certain tasks considered to be “masculine”. The bias also extends to conventional notions of how a woman should behave.

Says a senior marketing manager based in Delhi, “Once, after I had lost my cool with a male subordinate, I overheard him sniggering with my other subordinates ? both male and female ? saying that I was “menopausal”. If a male boss curses, screams or shouts, it’s considered to be perfectly normal. But when a woman boss does it, her entire sexuality is brought into the picture.”

“While the male is expected to be aggressive, the personality traits of a woman are characterised by her docility, humility and submissiveness,” explains Bhadra. “So, when her behaviour does not conform to these ideas, people try and find explanations, which are usually pejorative because the person is seen to be breaking the rules.”

Interestingly, when a man steps into what is traditionally considered to be a woman’s domain, he can face the same degree of discrimination. Says Bijon Roy, a Calcutta househusband who decided to give up his job as filmmaker when his son was born so that his wife could continue working, “I have faced a lot of derision.”

“Ideas about what role each gender plays in society have been imprinted into the collective unconscious of our society,” explains clinical psychiatrist Debashis Ray. “These impressions are not indelible, but they can only be erased slowly.”

Many women, in fact, have devised ways to “beat the system” as film director Anindita Sarbadhicary calls it. “Leading a unit full of men and women from different backgrounds with different ideas about the rights and wrongs of gender roles, I find that I have been able to achieve a certain ‘genderlessness’ in the way I conduct myself. In order to lead a team, it is your responsibility to make everyone ? whether man or woman ? feel comfortable.”

To exemplify how completely she has internalised this ‘sexlessness’, Sarbadhicary narrates a little anecdote. “Before a shoot, I asked all the males in the unit to leave the room because the female actors were going to change. Inadvertently, I too got up to go. And then I found myself thinking: “What am I doing? I can stay. I am a woman!” My entire unit teased me about this.

But as another top government official pointed out, “When you reach a certain level, you really do become sexless.”