Let us start with Dangal, a 2016 Bollywood production. Based on a true story, Dangal narrates the uphill struggle of a former national wrestling champion accepting the reality of four daughters and no sons to achieve his dream of India winning international championships. The movie shows the laborious struggle of his preteen daughters as they train to be wrestlers.

Right off the bat, the film introduces the restrictive kurti clothing and the rejection from male-only training facilities. The former champ built a makeshift tent by a crop field, acquired hand-me-down shorts from a nephew then enlisted the nephew as a training partner. When his eldest needed to test her prowess in a real match, then only available to boys, he pushed until an organizer relented. When his daughter defeated every single boy in roadside competitions, her father procured a proper facility so she could train for the championships — where she easily beat the other female competitors in her class to win a national medal, and she eventually became the first Indian female wrestler to win international medals.

The journey was no picnic. The Father and his daughters faced jeers from peers, boos from neighbors and the garden variety of insults from perfect strangers — mostly because girls tried to excel in a male-oriented field. Even as the film ended happily, some critics pointed out that the girls were only kicking well under their father’s tutelage to fulfill his dream.

The critics have a point, taking into account how deep patriarchy runs in India — where you can still find a widow self-inflict death after her spouse’s demise — sometimes it still takes a man to help show a woman’s abilities.

While not ideal, sometimes that is the grim reality. Once the first layer of glass ceiling is cracked, women should give chances to other women to form a critical mass needed to crack further layers. Geeta and Babita (two of the daughters) might have initially wrestled because of their dad, but now Indian girls can dream to become wrestling champs on their own. In the cutthroat corporate world that is the practice that has been adopted by a number of advanced-thinking men and women, some of whom I was lucky to be mentored under.

That was also the exemplary action of Dorothy Vaughan who supervised black female mathematicians working under NASA in the 1960s, as illustrated in the 2017 Hollywood production Hidden Figures.

Facing gender and race discrimination, Dorothy saw the opportunity to move her group ahead through mastering the then-novel IBM computing machines — she even had to trick her way into a computer-programming book available only in the public library’s Caucasian section. Far from making their jobs obsolete, her self-learning expanded the group’s knowledge into the new technology so they became indispensable—prompting white mathematicians to seek them out for guidance.

Pivotal help from the more ‘privileged’ — white, male or both — came in the form of risk-taking bosses, a chance-taking judge and supportive husbands in the case of geometry analytic wizard Katherine Goble and gutsy engineer Mary Johnson. Despite creative generalization to arrive at a happy ending, Hidden Figures still serves up a monument of bravery many parents and women can aspire to foster—especially in Indonesia.

To this day in Indonesia, regardless of merit, daughters can still be pushed aside for sons when parents have limited funds for education while female employees receive less than their male colleagues.

Indonesia needs mothers who split chores equally between the kids, fathers who dare to invest the family’s limited funds in smart daughters, foundation directors who open scholarships for capable women in male-dominated fields, executives who fight for pay according to merit rather than gender and political parties who offer patronage to female cadres for more than just their winning looks.

Opening windows of chance in education and work often takes another person to make it possible. That is what Indonesia should focus on.

Their only fault is having a crazy father, the dad in Dangal exclaimed. You need to see what your daughter can become, the academic advisor in Hidden Figures pushed. An advance for you is an advance for us all, Dorothy reiterated to Katherine and Mary.

Now that is my kind of chick flick, which is exactly what we need more of. Dissecting Beauty and the Beast, next?

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Lynda Ibrahim is a Jakarta-based writer with a penchant for purple, pussycats and pop culture.

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