Remembering Nirbhaya
Last June, a perceptions poll of 370 gender specialists conducted by TrustLaw, a legal news service run by Thomson Reuters Foundation, ranked India as the worst G20 country to be a woman. Six months later, the Nirbhaya case only underlined the same fact.
The good news, if one may call it that, is that Indian women are not the only ones at the receiving end of gender-based discrimination. Commenting on BBC’s Delhi correspondent Soutik Biswas’s report, ‘How India treats its women’ filed on December 29, a blogger called Crathiegirl, who describes herself as a “white, commonwealth born, UK res of many years”, says, “You obviously have never lived in a tiny scottish highland village where there exists a frightening tendency toward intolerance of ANYTHING non-white, non-scottish, non-male coming from ‘the real locals’ toward anyone with the temerity to in-come from further than 20 miles away. As a white, commonwealth born, UK res of many years I see the evidence of this every day toward myself and others.”
Biswas’ article makes the point that the Nirbhaya incident happened even while ‘the leader of the ruling party, the speaker of the lower house of parliament, at least three chief ministers, and a number of sports and business icons are women.’
So if Indian women cannot look to the government to give them the respect and dignity they need, nay, deserve, can corporate India start the process by creating islands of equal opportunity? Our Women’s Day special issue took a long hard look and came up with some answers.
Shalini Gupta, our Delhi correspondent, shot a number of queries to HR heads in the industry and on the whole, feels that the life sciences industry is doing a fairly good job on this front. Read her story, ‘Empowering women at work” on pages 62-65 of this issue.
On the other hand, Usha Sharma, our Mumbai correspondent, got slightly bitter-sweet responses when she asked if the glass ceiling was a myth or reality (pages 26-29). And rounding up this issue, is a trend story on the ‘New Age Nutra Sutra’, analysing the re-positioning of certain natural ingredients as health aids for women, spanning puberty to menopause and beyond. (pages 15-16)
Society will need to change its mindset to the girl child as well. As always, it pays to catch them young and start the process early. Maybe we can take cues from how other countries are nurturing young girls. US President Obama’s commitment to invest in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields has spawned initiatives like Rhode Island’s Tech Collective programme known as STEM in the Middle, to encourage girls to engage with STEM interests. Blogging about this initiative, George Goodno, Director of State Policy Communications at industry think tank BIO (and proud father of two daughters) explains how these initiatives hope to increase the ranks of STEMinists, i.e. young women who are interested in the STEM fields. (See blog post at this link:http://bit.ly/VSlwYZ) Can we have similar initiatives in India? With BIO, womeninbio.org and other global industry fora increasing their engagement within India, I do hope such ventures are on their agenda. Maybe Nidhi Saxena, CEO and Founder of Karmic Lifesciences and Founder President, Women In Bio India could take the first step?
Here’s hoping that by March 8 next year, India will have bettered its ranking among G20 countries on the same TrustLaw poll. And hopefully by then, Nirbhaya’s case would have reached its logical conclusion. Or is that too much to hope for?
Viveka Roychowdhury
Editor
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