Public anger at gender inequality in India must be seen as an - TopicsExpress



          

Public anger at gender inequality in India must be seen as an important—and long-overdue—social development, and it can certainly help in remedying the persistent inequalities from which Indian women suffer. It is, however, very important to understand the nature of female disadvantage in India, which can take many different forms. If the lack of safety of women is one aspect of it, the old phenomenon of “boy preference” in family decisions is surely another. Boy preference relates closely to the deep-rooted problem of what has been called “missing women,” which refers to the shortfall of the actual number of women from the number we would expect to see, given the size of the male population, and the female–male ratios that could be expected if there were symmetry in the treatment of women and men. There is, moreover, strong evidence that the economic and social options open to women are significantly fewer than those available to men; and going beyond women’s well-being, we have reason to ask also about women’s limited role in society and their ability to act independently, and how their initiatives and actions influence the lives of men as well as women, and boys as well as girls.
Posted on: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 08:06:10 +0000

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