Gender Issues
Disappointment was written all over her face. "I have lost all interest in travelling now " Susheela, the next-door neighbour declared to my mother.
Just months earlier, she had excitedly announced that her daughter was pregnant and that she
would be traveling to US to look after her daughter in the advanced pregnancy and post-delivery stages. This would be her first grandchild and her first trip abroad and she was due to travel in a few days. I thought, can there be anything more exciting than this?
My mother was worried and asked her "Is everything alright? how is your daughter and the baby doing?"
She replied "They both are fine, but the ultrasound scan results show that it is going to be a girl. I do not want a girl baby, I want a boy"
Her attitude baffled me and made me feel sore. She made it seem like girls were unwelcome/unwanted and inferior in some strange way and I promptly felt bad for the unborn for getting such a grandmom.
The sad part here is that she is not a one-off case. This attitude is seen not just with 'unpad'
villagers but even in educated families in urban areas.
In most cases, the biggest challenge for women to be considered equal to men, is not from the outside world, but from within their own homes. And the biggest hurdle for women in achieving equality is, ironically women themselves.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
18 Comments:
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At 9:03 PM,
Kishor Narayan said… -
your template gets all messed up on firefox :) .. it looks nice but i had to do a lot of research to find the "post a comment" link here :)
nice post ..
Like the way you have ended it .. its very true .. Women in India face problems not only because of chauvinist men, but because of older generation men and women who still think that women are to be a show piece inside the four walls of the house. Not much has changed in their mindset even with the flood of ads about the equality of men and women and about the importance of a girl child. -
At 2:41 PM,
Srikrishnan said… -
A glimpse of a typical orthodox Indian family will immediately suggest that a girl child is considered a "burden" on the family. The family goes into a "piggy bank" mode trying to save up money for the "big" day when the girl has to be married with heaps of dowry to the groom. A girl child is still considered an "outsider" to the family because she'll eventually move out and live with her in-laws. Feminists may cry foul at these comments, but it speaks about ground realities of families like Susheela's.Ofcourse, things are changing in India, but we still have a long way to go before we have a society without gender bias.
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At 3:53 AM,
Angshuman Sarkar said… -
At 12:50 PM,
मयंक जैन (makuchaku) said…...nothing about the post - but something you posted about on my old blog (http://makuchaku.blogspot.com) - makuchaku.modblog.com maybe down - I stopped using it after it used to be erratically down for days.
I have my own blog hosting now - infact from quite some time now!
Have a look at http://www.makuchaku.info/blog if http://makuchaku.modblog.com looked pretty hochpoched to you.
Keep up the posts.
Cya,
Maku
http://www.makuchaku.info/blog -
well....such a mindset is the result of centuries of practice and nurturing.... it wont go in a flash ....probably a reformist dictator might help ....educated ppl having such a mindset is unpardonable though.... well....its unpardonable any which way....
btw....i actually had forgotten my passwd again ....hehe ....but this time I actually wrote a post after a long long time -
Are you kidding me? First of all I was pretty shocked to read this and did not blv it at first..
To be frank enough I am still not able to blv it -- and these are well educated families , staying in "silicon" valley of india , who have travelled abroad and seen the world... 21st Century... etc etc..
Shock to me.. and again that too from a "lady's" mouth... no offense but I want to know wht her parents think about her (susheela)..
Are we short of things to fight about? Religion is always there , then there is money and color etc etc and now gender (well not now , its a old one but still....)
What is the difference ?
You may want to show ur neighbour (if your mom is still talking to her..!!) --
"....RESULTS
Means, SDs, and d-ratios for the six age groups are provided in Table 1. These data show that girls and boys were similar on the CAS Simultaneous and Successive Scales (d-ratios ranged from -.1 to .1). In contrast, differences between girls and boys were apparent. Girls outperformed boys on the Planning Scale (median d-ratio was .33, range = .24 - .43) and the Attention Scale (median d-ratio was .34, range = .23 - .49). These d-ratios are considered small to medium (Cohen, 1988).
The d-ratios for all groups are summarized by age in Figure 1. These developmental data show that the differences between girls and boys increases over the 5 through 9 year range in Attention and over the 5 through 7 ages in Planning. Overall, the girls outperform the boys by about one third of a standard deviation or about 5 standard score points. Interestingly, girls are slightly worse than boys from ages 8 through 17 in Simultaneous processing and slightly better than boys in Successive processing across all the age groups.... "
:-)
http://mypsychologist.com/hottopics/boys_girls.htm -
At 5:59 AM,
Akshatha Kamath said…@Shankar,
Agree with you!!! But more than the monetary aspect, its the matter of "Budaape ka Sahara". Girl child gets married and takes care of her in-laws, but if its a baby boy he stays with them (???) till their end and takes care (???) of them.
But times have surely changed except for a few Susheelas. From past 3 years whenever I met a family having a pregnant lady, the wish was more for a female baby :o) Silver lining is more obvious now, cheers!!!
@Roopa,
Good work on such a sensitive subject :o) -
At 11:39 AM,
karthik rao said… - Post a Comment
I do wonder what can be the reason for people to have such bias? Is religious salvation the only cause for this 'error in judgement'? If so, why aren't religious institutions coming forward to remove this 'roadblock' from the minds of the common man? I am reminded of the ad put forward by 'Ministry of Women and Child Welfare, Govt. of India'.
It has just 2 sentences. One in a large font in the centre of the sheet. 'Kalpana Chawla's brother owns a small shop in Hissar, Haryana.' Down below in a small font, it's written 'Don't abort the girl child!'.
One can just hope that the breed of Susheelas (with due regards to her) get eradicated at the earliest.