Gender equality: Global concern, Mumbai’s ignominy

The Human Development Report 2019 released this week by the United Nations Development Programme is predictable – India still ranks a low 129 out of 189 countries – but is useful for the light it throws on gender-specific indices. More than half the people across the world have a high-intensity bias against gender equality and women’s empowerment, it states. India ranked 122 from among 162 countries on the Gender Inequality Index.

The bias is well and truly visible across India – from courtrooms where women are mocked at in sexual harassment cases, to boardrooms where they struggle to make their voices heard; from public transport buses and trains where women are routinely molested, to streets where they must mentally calculate their risk of using public spaces; from homes where girls receive less education than their brothers, to farms and factories where equal wage is still not the norm.

Despite anecdotal signals of women breaching barriers and breaking ceilings in several domains, the bias exists. Is this surprising or distressing? More the latter, I’d argue. There is no argument anymore to not make gender education part of the school and college curriculum. Ideas about rights and justice are best inculcated in the young – in school if not at home – and nurtured across college disciplines from medicine, engineering, and accountancy.

Gender, gender equality, and women’s rights are not esoteric subjects to be taught to only an elite sliver of students in Humanities in universities. This is not only about a few laws that become part of the public discourse when a particularly heinous rape or rape-murder occurs; this is about introducing concepts of rights and justice in classrooms, expanding them through discussions, and crystallising them through assignments. ‘Catch ‘em young’ is important, ‘catch ‘em all’ is equally critical.

This was brought home in a recent study on Gender Equality Acceptability, perhaps the first of its kind, by the Mumbai-based women’s research and advocacy group, Akshara. The study examined attitudes/beliefs of young Indians between 15 and 29 years, across four metros and four cities, on six domains encompassing discrimination, masculinity, sexuality, violence, women’s work, and alternative sexuality. The sample size of nearly 6,500 was almost equally divided between men and women.

The broad brush finding was that the Gender Equality Acceptability Index was barely 62 where 100 would be a perfect score; the index for women was nearly 69, and 56 for men. Clearly, gender equality is more acceptable to women but nearly three of every 10 still do not buy into it.

The metro-wise differences are wide: Mumbai ranks at the bottom of India’s four metros, with an average of 56.7, while Kolkata tops the table with 70. Of the four cities – Ahmedabad, Bhubaneshwar, Ludhiana, and Vijaywada – Ludhiana turned out to be the most unacceptable about gender equality. The details reveal more: Mumbai’s women at 70 and men at 46, showed women as being far more accepting of gender equality; it was the city with the greatest difference in acceptability.

Overall, across the eight cities, two findings stand out: More women than men believed in equal rights across genders, and for women (sisters) to have property rights over their parents’ assets, which are not surprising. More men than women believed that men are breadwinners for their families, women who wear revealing clothes invite rape and sexual harassment, women who take sexual initiatives are of questionable character, women cannot run a house and hold a full-time job, women should tolerate violence and deserve to be beaten. But surprisingly nearly 39% of women believe that revealing clothes invites rape or sexual harassment, 28% of women believe that they should tolerate violence for the family’s sake, and nearly 20% believe that women can be slapped or beaten.

These findings underline the urgent need for gender education across the board and the need to deepen informal initiatives among women. A better rank in the UNDP’s Gender Inequality Index is a long way ahead but a start has to be made beyond vacuous slogans like Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao.