Few weeks back, I saw a video of Ema Watson delivering a speech[1] at United Nations. She was speaking about Gender Inequality as a part of her campaign for 'HeForShe'. What was striking about her speech was when she says that 'Gender issue is a men issue as well'. Yes it is a men issue too. Many times in our daily lives we hear men say things like 'don't be a girl/women or don't act like them'. I must admit I have a said it few times myself. By saying that, though sometimes unintentionally, we consider women to be weak and someone who is not at par with men.
The other incident that triggered me to write this article was when Times of India wrote an article[2] about Deepika Padukone with the photos of her boobs exposed and tried to prove that she is a hypocrite. The article was an in-effect of an interview where she said that 'based on the roles demand she can cover her body as well as keep her body uncovered, it's her choice what she does with her body'. In many countries across the globe, people have a problem when a women wears small clothes. However, in the same locality, when men walk around in shorts or banyan, people have no issues. So you know, Deepika is not a hypocrite, people who wants girls to go out on the road fully covered but who themselves keep tons of porn movies in the laptop are the real hypocrites.
Every day in our daily life we see gender inequality happening around us. For instance, I commute to office on local bus. Many times when we see around girls/women standing in front of our seats, we tend to offer our seats to them. I think the act of offering our seat to women itself is supporting gender inequality. Ofcouse it a good practice to offer our seat to old women or men or a pregnant women or maybe a women with a baby. However, to young women who is healthy enough to stand, it is an act of gender inequality. And the women who accept such offers make the case only worse.
This is just one such example. There may be many such cases you must be observing in your daily lives.
No doubt, some of us are trying hard to make this world same for all the gender. As you can see today, men and women are paid equally in corporate world. Women sports players are paid the same salary as their male counter part. You can also see many women holding the topmost positions of the organizations like HP, Yahoo, Pepsico, Facebook to name a few. Still, they are only very few. Major portion of the women across the globe are still living under the shadow of this inequality. And perhaps, as Ema Watson mentioned in her speech, some of these women might be holding the top positions because their parents didn't differentiate between boy child and gal child. Their teachers might have taught the same lessons to them in the same way as they might have taught to boy student.
Again, no doubt, women and men are built differently. So physically both the sexes are different. There is a chance that physically most men might be a little stronger than the women. But that does not make them weak in any way. Not to forget what women has to undergo during pregnancy. I don't know if we men can ever undergo such pain.
We live in the world of Mary Kom, who fought against the odds to enter the men's world of boxing. Like Mary, there are many such women who has time and again proved that women are at par with men across different domains.
So then how do we tackle this issue of 'Gender Inequality'?. What tangible steps can we take? Ofcouse we can say 'Change the mentality of men'. But I am sure that won't come under tangible steps. By tangible step, I mean small-small steps that we can take in our daily lives. For instance, stop offering our seat in bus to healthy women, stop categorizing anything(sports, work etc) as manly or womanly etc and more importantly to parents let you girl child choose whatever they want to do just like we allow our boys to do that. That's it.
I would like to close this article with a very nice good quote I came across
"We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters"- Gloria Steinem
[1]http://sociology.about.com/od/Current-Events-in-Sociological-Context/fl/Full-Transcript-of-Emma-Watsons-Speech-on-Gender-Equality-at-the-UN.htm
[2]http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/hindi/bollywood/news/Dear-Deepika-our-point-of-view-/articleshow/43084705.cms
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