GENDER INEQUALITY

                                                      Gender Inequality

Gender inequality refers to disparity between individuals due to gender. Gender inequality   is defined  both socially through social interactions and stratifications  as well as biologically through differences in  chromosomes and hormones. It is the unequal distribution of a society’s wealth, power, and privilege between females and males. Around the mid-nineteenth century until nowadays, three beliefs about women and men have prevailed as part of biology or evolution. “One, men and women have different psychological and sexual natures, two- men are inherently the dominant or superior sex, and three – both male female difference and male dominance are natural.” Considering these three beliefs, women experience gender inequality in different environments, stereotypes, and occupations. For example, women are stereotyped to be only a stay at home wife and to be in an environment where they are responsible for cleaning the house, cooking dinner, and taking care of the children. Nowadays, there are more women known to have jobs and not a stay at home wife, but yet they are still responsible, or show some responsibility for cleaning the house, cooking dinner, and taking care of the children. As for occupations among women, they experience the limitations of the occupations available. Women also experience less pay or earnings, and the devaluation of their work by society .Gender systems  are often dichotomous and hierarchical; binary gender systems may reflect the inequalities that manifest in numerous dimensions of daily life. Gender inequality stems from distinctions, whether empirically grounded or socially constructed. Women bear almost all responsibility for meeting basic needs of the family, yet are systematically denied the resources, information and freedom of action they need to fulfill this responsibility. More than a century ago, in 1870, Queen Victoria wrote to Sir Theodore Martin complaining about "this mad, wicked folly of 'Woman's Rights'." The formidable empress certainly did not herself need any protection that the acknowledgment of women's rights might offer. Even at the age of eighty, in 1899, she could write to A.J. Balfour, "We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist." That, however, is not the way most people's lives go - reduced and defeated as they frequently are by adversities. And within each community, nationality and class, the burden of hardship often falls disproportionately on women. The afflicted world in which we live is characterised by deeply unequal sharing of the burden of adversities between women and men. Gender inequality exists in most parts of the world, from Japan to Morocco, from Uzbekistan to India and to the United States of America. However, inequality between women and men can take very many different forms. Indeed, gender inequality is not one homogeneous phenomenon, but a collection of disparate and interlinked problems. These may be Mortality inequality, Natality inequality,Special opportunity inequality,Professional inequality, Ownership inequality etc. The vast majority of the world's poor are women. Two-thirds of the world's illiterates are female. Of the millions of school age children not in school, the majority are girls. Today, HIV/AIDS is rapidly becoming a woman's disease. In several southern African countries, more than three-quarters of all young people living with HIV are women. The current world food price crisis is having a severe impact on women. Around the world, millions of people eat two or three times a day, but a significant percentage of women eat only once. All this highlights the magnitude of the problem. Women are agents of social justice and social change and without their full emancipation, there would be no social progress. There are many theorists and or scholars which provide different sociological perspectives for this gender stratification.  In the functionalist view, they uphold that “gender differentiation has contributed to overall social stability.” (Schaefer and Lamm 1998). Sociologists Talcott Parson and Robert Bales, argued that in order for a family to function at all, chores or tasks must be done by a particular role or a division of labor must be established between marital partners. Within this division of labor, women are more likely or viewed by society to take upon expressiveness tasks or duties, which are concern for the harmony and internal and emotional affairs within the family; whereas the men are more likely to take upon instrumentality tasks, which refer to the focus of distant goals and the external affairs within the family. Functionalists view the potential for social disorder “only when all of the aspects of traditional gender stratification are disturbed.” (Schaefer and Lamm 1998). Feminist sociologist Helen Mayer Hacker stressed that it is the society’s cultural beliefs are what supports the social structure where men are put in a dominant position over women. Despite the way each perspective approaches the issue of gender inequality, they all accept the fact that there is a gender inequality among men dominating over women. 

Gender inequality, which remains pervasive worldwide, tends to lower the productivity of labor and the efficiency of labor allocation in households and the economy, intensifying the unequal distribution of resources. It also contributes to the non-monetary aspects of poverty – lack of security, opportunity and empowerment – that lower the quality of life for both men and women. While women and girls bear the largest and most direct costs of these inequalities, the costs cut broadly across society, ultimately hindering development and poverty reduction.

In no region of the developing world are women equal to men in legal, social, and economic rights. Gender gaps in access to and control of resources, in economic opportunities, and in power and political voice are widespread. To date, only four countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden) have achieved a combination of approximate gender equality in secondary school enrollment, at least 30 percent of seats in parliaments or legislatures are held by women, and women represent approximately 50 percent of paid employment in non-agricultural activities.  In most countries, women continue to have less access to social services and   productive resources than men:

• women remain vastly under-represented  in national and local assemblies, accounting for less than 10 percent of the seats in national parliaments, on average.

• in most low-income countries, girls are less likely to attend school than boys. Even when girls start school at the same rate as boys, they are more likely to drop out (in many cases after getting pregnant, often due to lack of access to reproductive health services);

•  in industrial countries, women in the wage sector earn an average of 77 percent of what men earn; in developing countries, they earn 73 percent. Only about one-fifth of the wage gap can be explained by gender differences in education, work experience, or  job characteristics.

In this   backdrop ,the UN rightly introduced gender equality as one of its goals of Millennium Development Goals. Goal 3 of MDG’s (promote Gender equality and Empower women)  has set the target of Eliminating  gender disparity in primary and secondary education ,preferably by 2005, and in all levels of education  no later than 2015. The pairing of the two concepts of women‘s empowerment and gender equality into one MDG implicitly recognizes that gender equality and women‘s   empowerment are two sides of the same coin: progress toward  gender equality requires women‘s empowerment and women‘s empowerment requires increases in gender equality  The good news is that despite gender inequalities worldwide, there has been  some progress since 1975, when the first World Conference on Women was held in Mexico City. In many parts of the world, gender inequalities in schooling and health have decreased, though significant gaps   persist in some countries. Progress has also been made in recognizing the cross-cutting nature of gender   issues and their relevance to development effectiveness and poverty reduction. There is now a shared understanding within the development community that development policies and actions that fail to take gender inequality into account and fail to address disparities between males and females will have limited effectiveness and serious cost implications. For example, a recent study estimates that a country failing to meet the gender educational target would suffer a deficit in per   capita income of 0.1-0.3 percentage points. Also, one of the main findings of the Arab Human Development Report 2011 is that the low empowerment of women is one of three deficits which have seriously hampered human development in the region over the last three decades. Thus, an approach to development that strives to increase gender equality has high payoffs for human well-being.

In India over the past decade, gender equality and women‘s empowerment have been explicitly recognized as key not only to the health of nations, but also to social and economic development. India‘s National Population Policy 2000 has empowering women for health and   nutrition‘as one of its crosscutting strategic themes. Additionally,   the promotion of gender   equality and empowering of women is one of the eight Millennium Development Goals  (MDG) to which India is a signatory. The Department of Women and Child Development was set up in the year 1985 as a part of the Ministry of Human Resource Development to give the much needed impetus to the holistic development of women and children. With effect from 30.01.2006, the Department has been upgraded to a Ministry. The broad mandate of the Ministry is to have holistic development of Women and Children. Several Acts enacted by the Indian government like the Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961, Protection of women from the domestic violence act,2005 and schemes like the ICDS, Indira Gandhi Matritya Sahyog Yojana(IGMSY)-(A Conditional Maternity benefit Scheme),Rajiv  Gandhi Scheme for Empowerment of Adolescent Girls(SABLA),STEP(Support to training and employment programme for women), Gender Budgeting scheme are signs of affirmative action’s by the government to fight this menace and work towards the women empowerment. In spite of these positive assertions certain statistics like in terms of Gender Equality index (GEI) ,India with an index value of 0.748 ranks 122 out of a total of 168 countries in 2008  indicates there is a higher degree of gender discrimination in India compared to countries like China(0.405) and Sri Lanka(0.599). High growth calls upon the maturing democracy to  redistribute a fair share of ‘growth benefits” with its fairer sex as well. The role of Women organizations,NGO’s , civil society and anchoring by the government agencies can go a long way to rebalance this adversity.Empowerment of women would remain a dream until the girl child is given equal opportunity in education as well as in health facility and needs to be treated indifferently in relation to the male child. The worsening child sex ratio and low records on maternal mortality indices highlight the exigency to come together to make Gender equality a reality. When anti-female bias is in action (such as sex-specific abortion) reflects the hold of traditional masculinist values from which mothers themselves may not be immune, what is needed is not just freedom of action but also freedom of thought - in women's ability and willingness to question received values. Informed and critical agency is important in combating inequality of every kind. Gender inequality, including its many faces, is no exception.It has been proved beyond doubt that when women are given opportunities, they explore their potentials fully and truly carve a niche for themselves. Indian women have proved themselves as able doctors, engineers, administrators, scientists …unfortunately they constitute a miniscule percentile…..let this freedom percolate to the bottom percentiles of the country and society so that all can independently assert and develop their capabilities and only then can true development occur. Meeting this challenge means delving into the nuances of social psychosis and treading a thin line in defining human capability of women vis-à-vis men.  It is no doubt a challenge but let’s meet the challenge boldly for the benefit of the mankind .