A Perspective on gender based problems and implications for education

By Charu Malhotra

Pooja1 a 12 year girl studying in grade 7 in a government school in Mulahera, Gurgaon was
once an eager, regular student good at her studies, and liked by her teachers. And then the
change happened. At first her attendance became irregular and she started missing school a
few days in between and then alarmingly for longer periods. Her personality changed
dramatically almost overnight. From a bright and bubbly child she became quiet and
withdrawn, prone to moody silences. She would drag her feet, retire to solitary corners and
slink in and out of school in a daze. And one day in year 2016 she gave up the burden
altogether and dropped out of school, which hinted at the finality of her fate, a closure as it
were. The truth when it was probed was a shameful disclosure of domestic violence, paternal
rape and a childhood gone horribly wrong! But while Pooja dropped out of school, she did
not drop out of life and instead fought her shame. She could easily have slipped into the
image of Tagore's heroine, Mrinmoyee of 'Samapati' a century later, in the way she dealt
with her problem - Pooja chose to take her father to court on grounds of violence and
rape....
There are general indications of gender disparity across countries despite the international
commitment to equal rights for girls and women under the stated objectives of Sustainable
Development Goals. In India, the interplay between lack of equal opportunities, parental
choice, little or no education, little or no gender sensitivity and societal norms often impede
the schooling of girls leading to disparity in participation of girls in education, violence and
crimes against females, female infanticide, early school drop-out for girls, early marriage and
early child bearing. All these strands have got entangled with each other over time, and
collectively are responsible for the institutional practice related to gender discrimination and
gender based violence (GBV)
Will it be safe to assume that the majority of females in India are discriminated against
because they are both poor and undereducated or illiterate? And what if they also live in
demographically challenged societies and in rural locales bogged down in the swamp of caste
& religion? Do higher levels of education have any co-relation with women empowerment?
What does evidence support? It is said that for a diverse and complex country like India
which boasts of pluralist cultures, languages and traditions there will always be an opposite
set of evidence which will challenge any stout claim to facts of any particular kind. So this
perspective simply meanders through a haze of peripatetic impressions, cameo views, honest
admissions and stark renditions of naked truths - none of these intended either as a last word
or a lasting judgment - but merely a fleeting montage of passing images etched on the
landscape of an evolving journey through the changing dynamics of a digitally emerging
India, the political rhetoric of 'beti padao, beti bachao and the 'wow' of Skill India!

Name has been changed to protect the identity

Gender is a biological difference but in the way it intercedes in society it has become a
cultural construct for discrimination. This discrimination is widespread in our cultural psyche
and finds expression in myriad institutional imprint. Education nurtures this construct
cleverly as an instrument for social control, of 'dominance', carefully laid out in an
arrangement of hierarchical distribution of chores as it were - one set of tasks reserved for
boys and another set chosen for girls. The narrative on GBV arising from this prism of
discrimination is influenced by the 'personality' of violence that females are prone to
experience. Violence is both insidious or covert and overt, that manifests itself in the lives of
girls and women in different circumstances
Who is a typical Indian female : one who lives in a village or in a city? Is she a working hand
or is a housewife ? Is she demure or aggressive? Is she technology savvy or kitchen happy?
Does she work in the field or in an office? Is she home bound or exposed to a larger world
view? If we try to put all these answers together into a cogent whole it will be the case of the
blind man piecing the image of an elephant. Net-net reality is multi-'perspectival' and it is
very difficult to draw a picture of a typical Indian female in the contemporary context
'Power distance2' a cultural dimension (Hofstede) and gender have an interesting relationship
which intervenes differently in different layers. In the first instance, the poor do not have
much of a choice of schools to which they send their children, assuming they attach
significance to education. If choice can be exercised then a private school is the first
preference for a son and a government school for a daughter. Next, when the money is scarce
and education is an opportunity cost, sons are educated and not daughters. Even in the
classroom, a hierarchy of jobs operates insidiously. Boys are given a different set of tasks
than girls. If furniture is to be moved around boys are called on to help whereas the chore of
fetching a glass of water for a visitor falls on the girls. This discrimination also extends to
popularly held beliefs that boys excel in some subjects more than girls. Madhu3 a 10 year old
studying in a private school in Delhi, was constantly berated and often had her ears pulled by
her teacher because her 'brains did not work' while doing Math. But her brother two years her
senior in the same school was always held up as an example of a "brainy boy" brilliant in
Math. While Madhu and her brother may have had differentiated aptitude for the subject the
teacher made a case for a gender based difference. This is not uncommon and Madhu's
teacher is not an isolated offender. In many socially and economically weak families while
math, engineering and medicine is a mandatory selection for boys to choose from , girls are
exempt from these expectations. Largely it is this lack of expectation and push from homes
towards the more humanistic disciplines, that has kept the girls from aspiring to reach out for
careers with a technical and professional orientation

'Power distance' denotes how a society accepts inequalities among people, and how power is distributed
unequally. in societies with a higher power distance people accept a hierarchical structure without
questioning or the need for any justification. In societies with low Power Distance, there is an inclination to
equalise distribution of power or inequalities of power demand justification : Geert Hofstede, Cultures
Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nations, 2001
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This same hierarchy is observed at an organisational level too. While the majority of
Principals in government schools would be male, primary and pre-primary teachers are
women because of the conception that women are more suited to teach children. Dr Sandra
Stacki in her paper Women Teachers Empowered in India: Teacher Training Through A
Gender Lens with reference to the Teachers Empowerment Programme (TEP) in Madhya
Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, draws links between womens teacher training and girls
education. The critical role of female teachers in reducing the gender gap in primary and
secondary education has been well established. Numerous studies indicate that girls in
developing countries learn better and stay in school longer when their teachers are women
(Dr Sandra Stacki, UNESCO, 1993).
And this also takes us to an interesting paradox - men will entrust the education of their
children to women teachers with an almost blind belief! Somehow the power struggle
between the sexes does not extend to this bastion of the women dominated role, in what
appears to be a silent agreement that women make the best teachers! Teaching is not
considered as the right fit for men who are attracted to the more paying and full time
professions. Teaching is still regarded a part time work in India and more amenable to female
occupation. This also has to do a lot with the portrayal of male and female roles in school text
books with the woman being projected as a housewife and the man being the bread earner
and children referred to as sons (he) rather than daughters. Male and female occupations
are also stereotyped - men are shown as engineers, doctors and lawyers and women as
teachers, nurses and homemakers. Now imagine countering these well established dogmas
and the dilemma and confusion it could create. Ramprasad4 a brave teacher in a rural school
in Barmer, Rajasthan, attempted to change mind sets. In a class on sanitation he referred to a
man cleaning the house. A student pointed out that while men can clean the litter outside the
house, say on the street, but any cleaning inside the home was the woman's job!
Females are in a particularly paradoxical situation regardless of their socio-economic or
demographic profile. They are expected to contribute to the family income and yet their
homemaker role is the predominant one. Babita5 an Anganwadi worker living in Varanasi,
Uttar Pradesh is very committed to her profession-but her work is not given the same
weightage and respect as her husband's and is underplayed. Geeta6 a teacher in Kasan,
Gurgaon earns around Rs 28000 per month and yet her contribution to family income is not
only unacknowledged but her professional effort is mocked and reduced to jaunts outside the
home in search of an additional identity!
But women even in rural remote corners are challenging stereotypes. They are pushing the
boundaries of their existence and matching strides with men. Once Imeyon, a housewife from
a rural hamlet in Barmer, Rajasthan, underwent an adult literacy programme, she wanted to
be further trained in a skill which would allow her to earn a livelihood

Name has been changed to protect the identity

Name has been changed to protect the identity
6
Name has been changed to protect the identity
5

Boundaries are narrowing and migration is driving villagers to cities in search of jobs to
augment agrarian income. This further complicates the issue of GBV where abrasive urban
pace infringes on simple rural mindsets. Anita7 a 13 year old from a family who had
migrated from a village in Uttar Pradesh to a slum catchment in Ghazipur, New Delhi, was
raped by an 18 year old boy living in a neighbouring jhuggi8. Did she report the rape and to
whom? She did tell her parents about it. What did the respective families do about the
incident? The boy's family paid off the girl's family and the girl's family sent the girl back to
the village to avoid rumours to safeguard family honour. Honour is an important theme in the
context of violence. Any behaviour or state which challenges status quo in terms of womens
assigned sexual and familial roles as dictated by traditional family ideology and culture is
perceived as violating honour. Thus adultery, premarital relationships (not necessarily
sexual), rape and falling in love with an unsuitable candidate are all in danger of infringement
of honour. On similar lines of honour and shame ideology are riot or war situations where
women become vulnerable targets. Education should enable girls to make informed choices.
Lack of access to that information because of deprived education forms the background to
much of schoolgirl pregnancy and child marriage, low self image and inability for self
protection. Given that violence on the basis of gender is most reflected in the personal
domain (36% of all cases in India were those of cruelty by husbands or relatives), it becomes
crucial for the school to work with both girls and boys at the school level, along with their
ecosystem, which includes stakeholders in school and community. The focus is to build
capabilities of providing preventive and effective conditions against GBV
If quality of education impacts individual earnings, economic-growth and social benefits
(Hanushek and Woessman, 2007, in Johanson et al), then pedagogic practice needs to be
vertically equitable with an additional focus on the girl student to empower them with
substantive freedoms to exercise their choice and rights so that the negative effects of
variables such as socio-economic, demographic and gender disadvantages lose all power.
Students themselves need to be active participants rather than neutral observers in issues
concerning them, even if it involves conflict resolution or questioning power distance
equations, to enable them to reflect upon their gender socialisation. This will help boys to
understand their duties towards girls, and will help girls to understand their rights and to
develop self-confidence necessary to prevent violence from occurring in the first place and to
understand how to deal with violence if it does occur. Moreover a school is subject to the
external environment comprising of economic and work forces, policy controls, and social
and cultural influences. Therefore family and community who constitute the immediate
environment of the school can be formidable in the way they impact educational progress
(Wolfendale and Bastiani, 2000 in Woods). So any narrative on gender empowerment should
also involve a collective discourse among social groups, NGOs and law enforcement
agencies on how to influence behavioural change, and social practice concerning gender. It is
essential that disparate institutions (eg, police, hospitals, administration and NGOs) are
brought to work together with each other and with the rest of society so that they are sensitive

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A shanty

to the issue and those that face gender-based violence have the confidence to approach them
if needed
We need to locate positive value in the praxis of our cultures which would anchor women
empowerment around a conventional axis, serve as a positive reinforcement and help us flow
with the tide rather than against it. Women have symbolically and traditionally been
portrayed in cultures & religions as natural nurturers and care givers upholding family values
and common code of conduct. Can we expand on these positives in our curriculum as the
epicentre of change?
The National Focus Group9 on Gender Issues in Education rings a cautionary note :
"It is not enough to just "interlude" women in the curriculum. The critical challenge is one of
developing alternative frameworks of knowledge that equally reflect the life worlds of both
men & women and carry within the seeds of a just social transformation."
The paper offers a "feministic critique" with examples for identifying opportunities for a
gender based appreciation in the teaching of subjects like History, Science and Technology,
Language, Political Science, Geography, Sociology and Mathematics. However experience
suggests that curricular strands recommended in the position paper depend on an incidental
inclusion, bias or chance for promoting (!) gender parity. How do schools then ensure that the
curriculum transcends mere tokenism or lip service to gender empowerment? Life skills
which operate at a transactional daily level are significant in developing capacity of girls and
women and will constitute empowerment. Knowledge, attitude, skills and values pertaining to
female health and hygiene are valuable as women need to be informed on sanitation
practices, personal hygiene, birthing, care & up-bringing of children, family planning,
nutrition both for their own and family health. In the current environment awareness about
legal and healthcare rights and procedures are an essential life skill. Financial literacy and
career counselling for pursuing a profession or options of supplementing family income, for
making informed financial choices, managing family budget, savings and money
management will create conditions conducive for empowerment. It is also necessary to
develop the faculty for questioning, critical thinking, developing a positive self image,
citizenship skills and making informed choices in general. The goal should be to reduce
gender disparity through increased understanding, reflection and awareness of the self in
relation to the social structure and to increase awareness of gender-based socialization during
formative years of children

Position Paper, NCERT, 2006