Chapter 8 - Gender and its intersection with Poverty, Class, Caste and Religion

Question- Since when did the status of women improve in our country? What is the condition of the woman even today?

Related Short Answer Questions
1. In our country even today, who is bound to live in low condition?
2. What kind of violence are women still forced to face?

Answer -

There has been some improvement in the condition of women in our country since independence but they are still far behind men. Our society is still patriarchal. There are still many forms of discrimination against women, they are oppressed :

• The literacy rate among women is still only 54 percent while that of men is 76 percent. Similarly, only a limited number of girls passing out of school are able to move towards higher education. When we look at the results of school examinations, we see that in many places girls have outperformed and in many places their performance is better if not less than boys. But the doors of further studies are closed for them because parents prefer to spend more on boys than on spending their resources equally on both boys and girls.
• Due to this situation, the number of women with high salaries and reaching high positions is still very less. In India, on average, a woman works an hour more a day than a man, but she does not get paid for most of the work, so her work is often not considered valuable.
• In the Act related to equal wages, it has been said that equal wages will be given for equal work. However, in every field of work, from the world of sports to the world of cinema and tomorrow - from factories to farms - barns, women are paid less wages than men, even though both have done the same work.
• In many parts of India, parents only want a boy. The methods of destroying the girl before she is born, grow from this mentality. Due to this, the sex ratio [number of girls per thousand boys] of the country has come down to 919. The research work done shows that in many places this ratio has fallen to 850 and in some places it has gone below 800.

We get to read daily news of harassment, exploitation and violence against women. Urban areas are especially unsafe for women. They are not safe even in their homes because there too they have to face beatings and many types of domestic violence.

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