Gender Stereotyped India And It's Effects

Gender is such a word that judges an individual before any other traits of that person can. Gender affects every aspect of people’s lives, starting from their choice of goals in educational, recreational, and work activities to how they feel about themselves and how they should act according to the eyes of society. It has such a strong impact on people’s lives starting from how they should dress, the way they should express their feelings, and how they should develop a relationship with other individuals. Starting from birth, an individual is given roles based on their gender.

If you are a girl, you need to behave like a girl, which includes wearing dresses, wearing your hair long, focused mainly on household activities, not too interested in sports, wanting to marry someone of the opposite gender, and the list goes so on. The same thing applies to the male gender. If you are a boy, you need to be interested in toy cars and not dolls. You need to earn money and be the primary earner of your family. Society made gender rules and gender roles in such a way that there is a stereotype in every field. Even in choosing colors. A male can never like the color pink. Or a female can be a housewife but a male can never be a househusband.

In this 21st century, some countries are getting over this whole gender stereotype but in comparison to them, India is still backward in a lot of ways in this particular field. In India, when a baby is born, the first question that is asked is “Is it a boy or a girl?”. This is a hypothesis created by the society where the rule has been made that if a child is born boy or girl, they will remain of that particular gender forever. Society just dumps gender roles without even having enough knowledge about one’s gender identity. In India, even today you are not allowed to know the gender of the baby before the delivery because a girl child is often killed when known.

Gender bias is when discrimination occurs due to their gender before knowing about their merits. India has a large number of laws that give privileges and special rights to people belonging to a particular gender. There are also different types of gender discrimination in the form of views such as in many places, men are considered superior to females which are known as male chauvinism but this is also considered in the society that males have to impose superiority over females, they are forced to follow the gender roles society throws at them which in order makes them ‘manly’ which is considered as toxic masculinity.

Nature doesn’t discriminate male from female. Society does. And this society is keeping on doing that for ages now. A very common example of this is considering women as ‘weaker sex’ than men. The male dominant society of India makes its women habitual of this discrimination in terms of social and political rights and also on the ground of employability and marriage. Women both literate and partially literate don’t get as many opportunities as men and in most cases remain stuck in household chores, raising children, and looking after the family.

While women are the most common sufferers, men face a lot of challenges due to gender discrimination as well. Even though sexual molestation on males is rare but they are not uncommon or unheard of. But they don’t get the required justice and in most cases, the police hardly take cases of sexual molestation of men in procedures, and FIR is rarely filed in this regard.

There are also other aspects of gender bias society that restricts same-sex marriage, gender transformation surgery, prejudices against transgender, not considering transgender as real genders, not giving them the proper opportunities in cases of jobs, not legalizing their marriage, and so on. But even in India, there are a large number of people who suffer from gender dysphoria which leads them to live with a gender with which they don’t identify themselves and ultimately committing suicide from depression.

By:Anisha Sen
Content: https://www.ohchr.org/en/issues/women/wrgs/pages/genderstereotypes.aspx