Equal opportunites for all or confined division of labor?

My grandmother recently visited us from southern India. My grandfather had passed away recently and so we thought we could better help her cope if she was here with us in the US. Having lived in India all her life, it was quite a change for her in terms of lifestyle, environment, and culture. Seeing her deal with the cultural shock opened my eyes to the startling differences between the two countries’ approach to life. While there are a plethora of things I could write about, the thing that perhaps struck me the most was her perceptions on how the household should be ran. In India, much of the traditional culture(now it is slowly changing and becoming more westernized) is centered around gender roles and socio economic status. The society is divided and delegated responsibilities based on these two criterion. It is not exactly a land of equal opportunities, much of your fate/life’s path is determined right at birth. It is hard to climb the ladder in India, and society functions within the roles defined by the rungs of the ladder.

In middle class and upper class families, each household has servants who run the household from cooking ,cleaning, washing clothes, serving food, every chore has a specific person designated to it and the masters and mistresses of the household supervise but never directly participate in this so called “menial work”. When I visit India, I’m largely reminded of this being like a form of slavery except on a nicer level. These servants work so hard, but are paid very little and given food only after everyone else has eaten—since they consist of the lowest rung of the ladder, they are looked down upon and we are not allowed to touch them or associate with them except on a professional basis. Because of the large household support they provide, many luxuries can be afforded by the members of the house—new dishes are expected at each meal, no leftovers being consumed but rather given to the servants. Having entered this country with such a mindset, my grandmother was shocked at the state of affairs at our house: leftovers consumed for days at a time, we all taking turns to do the dishes, each of us handling our own laundry or vacuuming the carpets. She was very upset for the first couple of weeks she was here thinking that we were struggling financially to be in such a state of affairs—when she came to know that this was how things worked here, she was even more surprised saying that this was not the way of things and how everyone could not be equal and allowed to do the same tasks.

The issue here seems to be whether everyone should be allowed equal opportunities in terms of economic and social progression or should certain people be confined to certain roles in the beginning itself? It seems that from a moral and ethical perspective, the former would be correct. These confinements of roles actually turns out to influence the economy as well and pave the way for corruption, briberies, black money, etc making it hard to climb the ladder or attain opportunities outside of birth right. But my grandmother doesn’t seem to know or understand these reasons partly because women traditionally were not taught to ponder on such things, or actually ponder at all. They were to accept and believe what was said, no questions asked. In this framework, my grandmother seems to have had a hard time leaving all that she has been taught to believe was correct and the proper way things worked to a totally different, and opposite way of thinking. In India, this type of division of labor has insinuated itself into the system—the different socioeconomic statuses occupying different forms of labor, making each status available to do a different set of jobs and hence not able to intermix among each other. Reforming that system into one of equal opportunities like in the US would need a gradual progression to inflict less damage onto economy as well as ease into the culture/mindsets of the people.