For how many years more need we keep shouting against gender discrimination?
So, here’s a bitter truth: We keep fibbing to the women in our lives that ‘we are one, we are equal’ but even in that oneness, women bring up the rear. The brute and practical fact is that in society, especially in the Indian ambience, men are more equal than women. This trend of verbally, vocally supporting an overall egalitarian attitude towards genders but adhering to traditional gender roles in lived realities is seen across spheres and segments. Even in educated, well-to-do households where there may be help to cook dinner and do the dishes, the women of the house are still expected to serve dinner to their menfolk first and, at the very best, join the meal only when it’s more than half way through for the gents. A case in point is the two surveys we mentioned in these very pages recently: The Pew Research Centre survey and the India Human Development Survey. In a nutshell, they reveal that nine in 10 Indians agree with the notion that a woman must always obey her husband. A whopping 43 per cent of the interviewees said that only men should be breadwinners, implying that women ought to confine themselves to home and hearth.
Worse, double that percentage wants scarce jobs to go to men. Take the pandemic waves, for instance. Here too, the bias tilts in favour of men, with as many as 80 per cent of the respondents explicitly saying that “when there are not enough jobs, men should have more rights to get jobs than women”. Not surprisingly, more women than men lost their jobs as a fallout of COVID-19. In low-income households, they not only lost jobs but were forced to reduce their food intake to feed their families. While one of the most prominent reasons for son preference, as per IHDS, was support in old age, the Pew survey also found that nearly two-thirds of Indians want to have a male offspring because sons are primarily responsible for their parents’ last rites and rituals. However, there may be a silver lining in that over 70 per cent adults say gender equality is important. But there still exist innumerable challenges and issues that women face concerning physical and mental health, including lack of education opportunities and unequal health facilities. So let’s take a step forward. Let’s have an equal-gender world, a world where difference is valued and celebrated. Collectively, we can #BreakTheBias. After all, Naari tu Narayani!