Gender, Religion and Caste
Gender division and discrimination
Explain how gender division disadvantages women in India.
Social differences can be political. Having many kinds of people does not threaten democracy. Sometimes it is good when social differences show up in politics. This chapter looks at three: gender, religion and caste, and asks when bringing them into politics is healthy and when it is not.
Gender division is made by society, not by nature. Many people think the roles of men and women are natural and cannot change. The book says no: they come from social expectations and stereotypes, not biology. A simple test: a little boy gets a toy car, a little girl gets a kitchen set. Nobody is born wanting either.
The sexual division of labour. Children grow up believing housework and child-care are women's job. So in most families women do all the work inside the home (cooking, cleaning, washing, looking after children) and men work outside.
- Men can do housework; they just think it is for women. When such work is paid, men take it up: most tailors and hotel cooks are men.
- Women do work outside the home too: in villages they fetch water, collect fuel and work in fields; in towns they work as domestic helpers or in offices. Most women do some paid work as well as housework. But their work is not valued or recognised.
Who works more? A time use survey (1998-99) found an average woman works a little over seven and a half hours a day and a man about six and a half. Men's work is more visible because it earns money. Most of women's work is household work: unpaid and invisible. One girl in the book says: 'Mummy tells people she doesn't work, but I see her working non-stop.'
Women organise. Women's role in public life, especially politics, was tiny in most societies. Women around the world agitated for equal rights, first for the vote, then for better education, careers and legal status. More radical feminist movements wanted equality in personal and family life too. A feminist can be a man as well as a woman: anyone who wants women and men to have equal rights. Today women work as scientists, doctors, engineers and managers. In Sweden, Norway and Finland, women take a very large part in public life.
India is still a patriarchal society. Patriarchy (literally 'rule by the father') means men are valued more and hold power over women.
- Literacy: only 54 per cent of women against 76 per cent of men. Girls do as well as boys in school, but drop out because parents spend more on sons' education.
- Pay: the Equal Remuneration Act, 1976 says equal pay for equal work, yet women are paid less than men almost everywhere, from sports and films to factories and fields.
- Sex-selective abortion has pushed the child sex ratio (girls per thousand boys) down to 919, and in some States it has dropped under 850, even under 800.
- Violence: women face harassment and violence, are unsafe in cities, and are not safe even at home from domestic violence.
Practise this lesson
Questions that get harder as you improve, a Tutor that helps without giving the answer away, and progress you can see. Free for every learner.
No account, no email address. Opens the real product.