The girls are not doing well, neither is the council: reading “The girls are not doing well” by Harnidh Kaur
“How do I stop feeling like a diversity employee?”
This is a question that many women ponder at some point in their careers, a little because of imposter syndrome, sometimes because of the mood in the workplace, and very often because of doubts about whether you were hired for a certain category, which comes from the conditioning that you have to justify your presence in the workplace. Harnidh Kaur understands this fear and tries to address it in her book, The Girls Are Not Fine: The Cost of Ambition, Careers and Becoming.
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Harnidh Kaur is a writer, poet, lawyer and cultural critic with an ambitious professional career in writing, startups, finance and elite education sectors, and this becomes relevant to the ideas she brings to life in her first non-fiction book.
Kaur begins the book by stating, “My experiences are data points, not the main plot.” It’s a necessary recognition for a book that begins with the author’s personal experiences and then expands them into an argument about women more broadly. Her personal anecdotes show what social structures feel like up close. However, the problem arises when their individual experiences are viewed as universal. Whose experiences are used here to construct this “we”?
A recurring idea that Kaur puts forward is that girls are trained from childhood to perform a certain “delicacy.” She writes: “It doesn’t appear out of nowhere, it depends on how girls are raised, how women are judged and how we are allowed to show ourselves in public.” However, Kaur’s answers to how to deal with this pressure to perform often involve individual choices that are open to women with the same socioeconomic freedom as the author herself.
Advice, but is it applicable?
Written in four parts, each dealing with a different type of societal pressure: How the workplace annoys the woman who simply asks and negotiates her share of the work, the expectation of being a “friendly friend” who needs little money, how the concept of “fifty-fifty” is never a fair deal in an inter-gender domestic environment, which should be a setback for those experiencing burnout trying to keep up with these expectations. Kaur’s advice to young readers is simple: say no, demand more, stop being high maintenance, become financially independent, build a support system, leave friendships that no longer serve you, and more. But despite her awareness, Kaur is hesitant to explore how the advice actually applies and under what conditions it might go wrong.
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A lot of this advice is very gender neutral and not necessarily bad. An emergency fund of savings is timely advice for anyone in their 20s, especially in India. A woman who is desperately trying to get or keep a job doesn’t necessarily need advice on salary negotiations, a woman who sees her social network as an advantage for future employment opportunities or as a step forward in increasing her social capital may not view these friendships as something to get out of because it no longer “uses” her. Kaur’s advice to stay away from friendships that may not be available for calls at 3 a.m. measures emotional bonds versus material benefits. Not every friendship is equally “useful” at every stage of life. Life happens to everyone, and choosing to push through difficult periods in life when a friend needs more support than they can give is what sustains friendships into adulthood.
Who can say no?
Kaur then explains why boundaries are necessary, especially between family members and in the workplace. However, Kaur’s book does not address the idea that recognizing the need to set boundaries and having the power to enforce them are two different things. Indian girls are indeed not doing well and many of them are well aware of it. What is unevenly distributed among girls is the ability to solve the problem, because recognizing the problem and seeing it as the norm is the easier part.
Kaur’s book is about saying “no.” Women are often expected to give reasons for their rejection, and their no is rarely treated as a complete sentence. Kaur’s advocacy for normalizing the restriction of statements after a no vote only applies as long as there are no active repercussions that impact her career. The interesting contradiction is that Kaur is aware that women who refuse will be labeled “difficult” or “aggressive.” Therefore, the book faces a confusion to decide which side to push more: a no is a whole sentence or that no could punish you. And ignoring the question: Who can actually afford to say no to these deadlines and the additional workload?
The gap between the book and its reader
A book promoted as a guide for women in their twenties assumes that the reader is an urbane, educated, conscious and professionally progressive woman with a degree of economic and social freedom. The author herself meets these criteria and acknowledges her privilege at the beginning of the book herself, but the same assumptions about what a woman can do remain between the lines of her work.
Kaur’s advice on achieving financial independence is valuable and an age-old wisdom passed down by previous feminist thinkers WoolfVolga and Simone De Beauvoir among other things. However, there are very few cases in which the difference between financial independence is defined as a personal vanity and a case in which an income is needed to survive, and Kaur continually treats it as the former rather than the latter.
The more pressing question here is whether all of these observations were necessary to become a full-length non-fiction book?
Careers have setbacks, boundaries are important, women do more unpaid housework, financial independence gives you freedom of choice in life, these are important things to talk about. But these arguments are hardly new. These themes and versions of them have been explored for years by feminist writers, bloggers, and online communities around the world. The commonality is that the distance between those who actively discuss it and those who actually need to hear it remains a relevant issue, shaped by differences in digital literacy, access and acceptance of patriarchy as a norm in their lives. Harnidh Kaur’s The Girls Are Not Fine doesn’t offer much advice to fill this gap.
The end result is a 350-page self-help book with a promising premise that explains to women that their exhaustion, ambition, and burnout are not individual flaws, but something that so many others feel. The book has enough material to make itself relatable to any female reader, it allows readers to underline sentences if they recognize themselves in those pages, and that’s exactly where it stops. With names and metaphors such as “fuck-you funds” for emergency savings and “burnout bank” for close circles of friends, an attempt is made to present old ideas as new arguments.
The girls are actually not doing well, but Kaur’s advice doesn’t apply to all girls who are not doing well.
The Girls Are Not Fine: The Cost of Ambition, Careers, and Becoming by Harnidh Kaur is published by Penguin India.
Madhuri Kankipati is an independent writer and researcher based in Khammam, Telangana. She translates between Telugu and English, with a focus on women writers. Her work focuses on politics, gender, literature, digital culture, AI and the impact of AI in Indian publishing. Her writing has previously appeared in The Chakkar, Muse India and Borderless Journal. She also writes about books and AI ethics.
