Are women equal?

The media today is trying to portray the Indian girl child in a different limelight. Traditionally, they showed her as a mother, sister, an obedient daughter, daughter in law and wife whose significant contribution to the society was only through raising a family and instilling values in the younger ones. However, over the decades her image has transitioned from the traditional role to a modern structure where they are showing her as a person who aspires to become an independent, financially sufficient and an individual with a mind of her own. Here she enjoys an independent identity such as a doctor, astronaut, police officer and working professional. For example, If we look at the television advertisement for HDFC where the girl aspires to become an astronaut and her father supports her to arrange for the finance of her education.

This move indicates that girls are moving out of their traditional roles and adopting the new roles of a modern woman. However, in reality small incidents over the past months have taught that girls are still not treated at par with boys. Going forward we will enumerate a few incidents that took place at a co-education municipal school with volunteers that re-instilled the notion that inequality between genders still prevails.

The first incident took place when standard eight students in the age group of 14-15 years were called to speak in the class. Both boys and girls participated in the class. However, when girls started speaking the boys of the class booed them causing the girl to go silent and clam up. This incidence showed that male dominance existed in a subtle form.

The second incident took place when the volunteers had given homework. On asking the class, the volunteers found out that the boys had not done it whereas all the girls had done theirs. When they started collecting the notebooks containing the homework, the boys started jeering at the girls and one or two boys stood up and tore the girl’s notebooks. This situation showed that boys wanted to remain dominant and did not want girls to overtake them.

The third incident took place when we called the girls and boys to speak in front of the classroom. The volunteers found that boys were teasing girls with boy classmate name. This created an embarrassing situation for the girls and demoralized them. Thereafter the girls stopped participating in the class activities.

When we look at what was the main reason behind the boys’ misbehavior we discovered that they had grown up in an environment where they have been witness to the female gender being beaten, abused and treated harshly. These boys tried emulating their environment and replicated the same situations in a subtle manner that took form of teasing, jeering, etc.