Gender Equality

 

Gender equality does not mean that men and women become the same; This means that their access to opportunities and life changes is neither dependent on nor constrained by their gender. This is achieved when women and men have equal rights and opportunities in all areas of society, including economic participation and decision-making, and when the different behaviours, aspirations and needs of women/girls and men/boys are treated equally. They are valued and supported.

 

It also means that the specific interests, needs and preferences of girls/women and boys/men are taken into account; that the diversity of different groups is recognised; and that they can each make choices and are not limited by stereotypes and prejudices about gender roles in society.

 

 

 

Now we need to know why gender equality is needed:

 

• Gender equality is not only a fundamental human right, but an essential foundation for a peaceful and sustainable world.
• To build prosperous societies and economies.
• By providing equal access to education, decent work, and representation in the political and economic decision-making process, not only should women have rights, but all of these would benefit humanity at large.
• It will not only make progress on the target of the Sustainable Development Goals, but also make gains on poverty alleviation and promote sustainable economic growth.

 

 

• During menstruation, girls need designated toilets with running water and clean waste disposal. If schools do not provide such facilities, girls may be forced to take leave, skip classes, and may even drop out.
• Girls face gender-based violence and sexual harassment while attending school – this affects their health, affects their attendance and participation in schools.

 

This requires addressing the specific barriers girls and women face and creating affirmative action plans. As such temporary special measures have been instituted by India such as:

 

• 33% reservation for women in local bodies or panchayats;
• A separate compartment for women in metros/trains.

 

• Different buses, autos, taxis, safe transpo

 

 

 

 

Sex Vs Biology

 

1. In every society, gender is the primary division between people. Every society has its own expectations of what is appropriate for men and women. To try to guarantee expected differences, every society socializes men and women into different behaviors and attitudes. Similarly, every society has set up barriers that provide unequal access based on gender.

 

2. Contemporary Indian society has been exposed to the pervasive processes of social change, agricultural modernization and economic growth, urbanization and rapid industrialization and globalization. However, these processes have created regional imbalances, sharpened class inequalities and exacerbated gender inequalities. Women have therefore become important symbols of these growing imbalances. All these have adversely affected various aspects of the status of women in the contemporary Indian society.

 

 

3. Why do males and females do different things? For example, why are most men—unlike Tamils—more aggressive than most women? Why do women enter “nurturing” professions such as nursing and child care at a much higher proportion than men? To answer questions like this, most people answer, with some variation, “they’re born that way”.

 

4. Sociologists find the argument most compelling that if biology were the dominant factor in human behavior, we would find women all over the world to be a type of

 

 

5. Women warriors are not unknown in the world; They are rare. When the revolution ends, as has happened in all previous instances in the world, Tamil women will resume behavior in keeping with their biological predispositions.
6. Although the controversy is still unresolved, the dominant sociological position is that gender differences occur because every society in the world uses sex to mark its people for special treatment (Epstein: 1988).

 

7. Men and women segregated into different groups learn opposite expectations in life and have different access to the privileges of their societies. As symbolic interactionists emphasize, visual differences of sex do not come with meanings built into them. Rather, society interprets those material differences, and thus men and women take their place in life according to the meaning that a particular society assigns to them.

 

8. Women are inevitable, programmed into human nature. “This argument is simply a defense by the oppressors and is no more valid than the Nazis’ argument that they were the master race and Jews inferior sub-humans.
9. A re-examination of the anthropological record reveals that there is much more equality between the sexes than we would have liked in the past. In earlier societies, women participated in small-scale hunting, designed tools for hunting and gathering, and gathered food alongside men.
10. Studies of present-day hunting and gathering societies also show that “the roles of women and men have been broader and less rigid than those created by conservatism and gathering societies in which women are not subservient to men . Anthropologists who study them claim that women have a separate but equal status at this stage of development”.
11.  If sex differences were due to physiology, wouldn’t societies have relied on “instinct” for their division of labor? Instead, however, “the types of tasks that men and women perform in each society are determined by the society, allowing some individuals to make choices outside the prescribed limits”. To keep women in line and men to dominate, elaborate social mechanisms have been developed—from raised eyebrows to laws and social customs that separate men and women in “sexually-appropriate” activities.
12. Biology “causes” some human behavior, but it is limited to reproduction or body structure that allows or inhibits social access, “such as playing basketball or crawling at a small speed”.
13. The rising status of women in Western societies and other parts of the world invalidates the idea that the subordination of women is continuous and universal. Female crime rates are rising closer to those of males, again indicating a change in behavior due to social circumstances, not a change in biology.

 

14. Women are participating in “adversarial, assertive and dominant behaviour” at all levels of the judicial system. Not coincidentally, her “dominant behavior” also reflects the biased ideas about human nature in female challenges that have been proposed by scholars.
15. In short, it has been social factors—socialization, exclusion from opportunity, disapproval, and other forms of social control—from women’s inability or inability to read legalese, to perform brain surgery, (or) to have a bull market. to predict … that kept them away from interesting and highly paying jobs.” The arguments, “which imply an evolutionary and genetic basis of hierarchy involving sex status” are simplistic. and a bunch of bad data

rest on questionable structure, oversimplification in argumentation and inappropriate references by use of analogies” (Epstein 1988).

 

 

 

For sociologist Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, differences between the behavior of men and women are simply the result of social factors—sociality.

and social control.

His reasoning is as follows:

16. Just because an idea has been around for as long as anyone can remember doesn’t mean it’s inevitable or based on physiology. Would anyone argue that anti-Semitism, child abuse, or slavery are biologically determined? Yet a new group of “experts,” the social-biologists, “feel comfortable believing the subjectivity

 

 

17. When we consider how women and men differ, the first thing that usually comes to mind is sex, the biological characteristics that separate men and women. Primarily, the penis typically consists of a vagina or a penis and other organs related to reproduction; Secondly, gender characteristically refers to physical differences between males and females that are not directly linked to reproduction. Secondary characteristics become clearly evident at puberty when males develop more muscles, lower voices, and more hair and height; While women build more fatty tissue, wider hips and larger breasts.

 

 

 

18. In contrast, gender is a social characteristic, not a biological characteristic. Gender which varies from one society to another refers to what a group considers appropriate for its men and women. In short, you inherit your sex but you learn your gender as you are socialized into specific behaviors and attitudes. The sociological importance of gender is that it serves as a primary sorting device by which a society regulates its members. Ultimately, gender determines the nature of people’s access to power, wealth, and even prestige in their societies. Gender is much more than what you see when you look at people. Like social class, gender is a structural feature of society.

 

19. Biology certainly plays an important role. Every person starts out as a fertilized egg. The egg, or egg, is given by the mother, sperm, which fertilizes the egg by the father. The moment the egg is fertilized, the sex of the individual is determined. Each individual receives twenty three pairs of chromosomes from the egg and twenty three pairs from the sperm. Egg contains X chromosome. If the sperm that fertilizes the egg also has an X chromosome, the embryo becomes female (XX). If the sperm has a Y chromosome, it becomes male (XY).

 

20. Does this difference in biology account for the difference in behavior between men and women? Does it, for example, make women more comfortable and more nurturing and men more aggressive and domineering? While nearly all sociologists take the side of “nurture:” in this “nature versus nurture” debate, some do not, as you can see in the pages that follow.

 

 

21. Sociologist Steven Goldberg finds it surprising that anyone should doubt “the difference between men and women—the difference in appearance, temperament, and feelings we call masculinity and femininity.” He argues that this environmental Rather, it is the innate difference that “gives Masculine and feminine directions for the feelings and behavior of men and women.”

 

22.  An examination of original studies of societies around the world reveals that not one of the thousands of societies (past and present) lacks patriarchy for which there is evidence. The stories about past matriarchies (societies in which women dominated men) are mere myths; They don’t make good history, and if you believe them you might as well believe the myths about Cyclops.
23.  “All societies that have ever existed have associated political dominance with males and have been governed by hierarchies overwhelmingly dominated by males.”
24.  In all societies, the highest status non-maternal roles are associated with men.
25.  Just as a woman of six feet does not prove the social basis of height, extraordinary individuals, such as high achievers and influential women, do not contradict the ‘physiological roots of behaviour’.
26.  Values, songs and proverbs in every society “associate dominance with the male in male-female relationships and encounters.”
27.  Of the thousands of societies that we have evidence of, not one inverts the expectations of men and women. “Why, he asks,” does every society from the Pygmy to the Swede associate dominance and achievement with men? Mustaches can grow because boys have been socialized that way.

 

28. The male dominance of society is only “an inevitable social solution to the psycho-physiological reality”. Any explanation other than innate differences is “false, ignorant, tendentious, intrinsically illogical, inconsistent with the evidence, and impossible in the extreme.”
29. While this reality leads to discrimination against women, whether one accepts the result or not is not the issue.

 

 

30. Development of “psycho-physiological instincts”. Rather, socialization and social institutions

Gentiles only reflect—and sometimes exaggerate—tendencies. Societies around the world expect men to dominate because that is what their members see. They then reflect this natural tendency in their socialization and social institutions.

31. In sum, males “have a lower threshold for eliciting dominance behavior … a greater propensity to display the behavior in any environment necessary to achieve dominance in hierarchy and male-female encounters and relationships” . Men “have a greater willingness to sacrifice the rewards of other motivations—the desire for affection, health, family life, security, relaxation, leisure, and so on—in order to achieve dominance and status.
32. This principle does not apply to every man or every woman but to a statistical average. All those averages, in large numbers, become the determinant. The cross-cultural evidence of why these social institutions “always work in the same direction” has only one explanation valid.