A couple of days ago I visited Doordarshan’s Chennai studios for a recording. After I left, I couldn’t help but think about gender roles and women in the workplace.
Nearly every person I encountered was a male. When we entered the studio room, there were a coterie of about ten men, whiling away their time (which I guess is typical of a state-run enterprise, but let us not get to it now). Security personnel at the gate, a group of people collecting information on who enters or leaves the place, camera crew, sound engineers, and the show’s producer were all men. Employees in the make-up room were all women, reinforcing gender stereotypes. There was one woman in the studio who checked the sound level, and two there were two female janitors.
I am curious to know why there were no male employees in the makeup room. Or, why all cameramen, light operators, studio foreman and the producer were all men. Is this because women were denied opportunities by their own families, or because society discriminated against them?
Categories: India
Tagged: doordarshan, gender, government, India, inequality, sexism
Stop saying “Girls outshine boys,” because they don’t. It is this time of the year, and board exam results across the county are announced. The recurring theme is girls do better than guys. I was always puzzled on how this could be possible. The data is crying out loud asking someone to take a look. Where are all the anti-Larry Summers of India?
This year, 82.28% of girls cleared the CBSE exams while only 71.29% of boys did. In this article from 2004,
[Educator Rita Kaul] feels that “the methodology of CBSE exams is more suited to the girls who find cramming easier. Boys, on the other hand, do better in entrance exams that are application-based.”
Great. Thanks for sharing your feeling.
Everyone conveniently ignores the most important story here. Only 41% of candidates in this year’s CBSE exams are girls. Girls do not get educated as much as boys do. (I know this is just one board, but after cursory glance at numbers in state boards exhibit the same disparity. World Bank development indicators convey the same.) It is likely that underperforming girls drop out at higher rates than underperforming boys.
People and the media either want to ignore this, or think it is just the norm and not newsworthy. At the very least the media can afford some attention to this fact and get people thinking for a moment before they go back to discussing IPL’s closing ceremony.
Categories: India
Tagged: cbse, education, gender, India, inequality, media, rant, sexism
