B.ed Notes Gender School and Society | Semester-IV | Course-VI (1.4.6)
- Describe briefly the major causes of gender discrimination.
- 'Gender is a Social Construction'-Explain.
- Discuss the significance of Gender Inequality with relevant examples.
- Discuss the effects of Gender bias in Society and Family.
- Give a short description of "Gender bias'.
- State the causes of gender bias.
- State the role of school in reinforcing gender identity.
- Write the factors determining gender stereotypes.
1. Describe briefly the major causes of gender discrimination.
☐ The most important causes of gender discrimination such as poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, social customs, belief and anti-female attitude are discussed here:
✸ Poverty: In India of the total 30 percent people who are below poverty line, 70 percent are women. Women's poverty in India is directly related to the absence of economic opportunities and autonomy, lack of access to economic resources including credit, land ownership and inheritance, lack of access to education and support services and their minimal participation in the decision-making process.
✸ Illiteracy: Despite the notable efforts by the countries around the globe that have expanded for the basic education, there are approximately 960 million illiterate adults of whom two thirds are women.
✸ Lack of Employment Facilities: Women are not able to resolve the conflict between new economic and old domestic roles. In both rural and urban India, women spend a large proportion of time on unpaid home sustaining work. Women are not able to respond to new opportunities and shift to new occupations because their mobility tends to be low due to intra-household allocation of responsibilities. Rights and obligations within a household are not distributed evenly.
✸ Social Customs, Beliefs and Practices: Women are not free from social customs, beliefs and practices. The traditional patrilineal joint family system confines women's roles mostly to the domestic sphere, allocating them to a subordinate status, authority and power compared to men. Men are perceived as the major providers and protectors of a family while women are perceived as playing only a supportive role, attending to the hearth.
✸ Lack of Awareness of Women: Most of the women are unaware of their basic rights and capabilities. They even do not have the understanding as to how the socio-economic and political forces affect them. They accept all types of discriminatory practices that persist in our family and society largely due to their ignorance and unawareness.
2. 'Gender is a Social Construction'-Explain.
☐ The social construction of gender a notion in feminism and sociology about the operation of gender and gender differences in societies. According to this view, society and culture create gender roles, and these roles are prescribed as ideal or appropriate behaviour for a person of that specific sex. Some supporters of this idea argue that the differences in behaviour between men and women are entirely social conventions, whereas others believe that behaviour is influenced by universal biological factors to varying degrees, with social conventions having a major effect on gendered behaviour.
The social construction of gender comes out of the general school of thought entitled social constructionism. Social constructionism proposes that everything people 'know' or see as 'reality' is partially, if not entirely, socially situated. To say that something is socially constructed does not mitigate the power of the concept. Take, for example, money. Money is a socially constructed reality. Paper bills are worth nothing independent of the value individuals ascribe to them. The dollar is only worth as much as value as Americans are willing to ascribe to it. Note that the dollar only works in its own currency market; it holds no value in areas that don't use the dollar. Nevertheless, the dollar is extremely powerful within its own domain.
These basic theories of social constructionism can be applied to any issue of study pertaining to human life, including gender. Is gender an essential category or a social construct? If it is a social construct, how does it function? Who benefits from the way that gender is constructed? A social constructionist view of gender looks beyond categories and examines the intersections of multiple identities and the blurring of the boundaries between essentialist categories. This is especially true with regards to categories of male and female, which are viewed typically as binary and opposite. Social constructionism seeks to blur the binary and muddle these two categories, which are so frequently presumed to be essential.
3. Discuss the significance of Gender Inequality with relevant examples.
☐ Gender inequality refers to the broad range of conditions by which women have been disadvantaged, including their economic opportunities, political standing, legal status, personal freedom, familial obligations, access to education, and cultural representation. In other words, we can say that, gender inequality refers to the obvious or hidden disparity between individuals due to gender. Agrawal in her article 'Gender Inequality, Cooperation and Environmental Sustainability has stated three specific characteristics of gender inequality. They are as follows:
Gender inequality dwells not only outside the household but also centrally within it.
⚫ Gender inequality stems not only from pre-existing differences in economic endowments (wealth, income, etc.) between women and men, but also from pre-existing gendered social norms and social perceptions, i.e., the inequalities are also ideologically embedded.
⚫ Gender inequalities not only pre-exist in the noted forms, but they can also arise from newly defined rules and procedures that structure the functioning of the governance institution itself. The major determinants of gender inequality are social setup, culture, religion, geographical conditions, economic setup, moral standards and education level of the society. All these determinants individually or in combination make up the face of gender discrimination. But the conflict of gender inequality is divergent in nature as it originates from a single point with different angles.
4. Discuss the effects of Gender bias in Society and Family.
☐ The effects of Gender bias in Family are as follows:
⚫Girls in India still do not have the same access to education as their male.
⚫The lower enrolment of girls in schools and playing the role of second mother by shouldering the responsibilities of household work such as looking after the siblings.
⚫ Child Marriage.
⚫Early Marriage.
⚫ Religious Customs.
The effects of Gender bias in Society are as follows:
⚫Patriarchal society is one of the major challenges for women empowerment. Patriarchy is a
social system of privilege in which men are the primary authority figures, occupying roles of
political leadership, moral authority, control of property, and authority over women and children.
⚫ Unpredictable attitude of society towards women.
⚫ Discrimination against girls.
⚫In social field, women are suppressed domestically and do not enjoy respectable position. They are not regarded as intelligent and powerful enough as men.
5. Give a short description of 'Gender bias'.
☐ Gender bias is behavior that shows favoritism toward one gender over another. Most often, gender bias is the act of favouring men and/or boys over women and/or girls. However, this is not always the case. In order to define gender bias completely, we first must make a distinction between the terms gender and sex. When we use the term gender, we mean socially constructed expectations and roles for women and men, for girls and boys. Specifically, girls and women are expected to demonstrate feminine behavior, and boys and men are expected to act masculine. By sex, we mean biological differences assigned to females and males in order to distinguish between the two. The biological characteristics assigned to females and males often consist of primary or secondary sex characteristics.
It is defined as a preference or prejudice toward one gender over the other. Bias can be conscious or unconscious, and may manifest in many ways, both subtle and obvious. In many countries, eliminating such preferences is the basis of many laws, including those that govern workplaces, family courts, and even the voting booth. Despite these efforts, many legal and political scholars argue that total gender parity remains a far-off goal, one which many regions are not remotely close to reaching.
Gender bias is a preference or prejudice toward one gender over the other. Bias can be conscious or unconscious, and may manifest in many ways, both subtle and obvious. It is the unequal treatment in employment opportunity such as promotion, pay, benefits and privileges and expectations due to attitudes based on the sex of an employee or group of employees. Gender bias can be subtle or overt and can result in small or large consequences. Most countries have laws eliminating gender bias in workplaces. Gender bias can be a legitimate basis for a lawsuit under anti-discrimination statutes. Gender bias is behavior that shows favoritism toward one gender over another. Most often, gender bias is the act of favoring men and/or boys over women and/ or girls. Gender bias occurs when people make assumptions regarding behaviors, abilities of preferences of others based upon their gender. Because there are strong gender role stereotypes for masculinity and femininity, students who do not match them can encounter problems with teachers and with their peers.
6. State the causes of gender bias.
☐ The causes of Gender Bias are as follows:
✸ Uneven Access to Education: Around the world, women still have less access to education than men. One-fourth of young women between 15-24 will not finish primary school. That group makes up 58% of the people not completing that basic education. Of all the illiterate people in the world, two-third are women. When girls are not educated on the same level as boys, it has a huge effect on their future and the kinds of opportunities they'll get.
✸ Lack of Religious Freedom: When religious freedom is attacked, women suffer the most. According to the World Economic Forum, when extremist ideologies (such as ISIS) come into a community and restrict religious freedom, gender inequality gets worse. In a study performed by Georgetown University and Brigham Young University, researchers were also able to connect religious intolerance with women's ability to participate in the economy. When there's more religious freedom, an economy becomes more stable thanks to women's participation.
✸ Lack of Political Representation: Of all national parliaments at the beginning of 2019, only 24.3% of seats were filled by women. As of June of 2019, 11 Heads of State were women. Despite progress in this area over the years, women are still grossly underrepresented in government and the political process.
✸ Racism: It would be impossible to talk about gender inequality without talking about racism. It affects what jobs women of color are able to get and how much they're paid, as well as how they are viewed by legal and healthcare systems. Gender inequality and racism have been closely linked for a long time.
✸ Societal Mindsets: It's less tangible than some of the other causes on this list, but the overall mindset of a society has a significant impact on gender inequality. How society determines the differences and value of men vs. women plays a starring role in every arena, whether it's employment or the legal system or healthcare. Beliefs about gender run deep and even though progress can be made through laws and structural changes, there's often a pushback following times of major change.
7. State the role of school in reinforcing gender identity.
☐ The gender inequities prevailing in society are carried into the school environment. This is evidenced in school processes such as teaching, teacher-student interaction, school management, and the plan and design of the physical infrastructure. Teaching and learning materials, for example, may contain gender stereotypes. Teachers are not always aware of the gender specific needs of both girls and boys. School management systems may not sufficiently address gender constraints such as sexual harassment, and many schools do not have adequate or separate toilets for girls and boys. As a result, the schools do not provide a gender responsive environment for effective teaching and learning to take place. In order to arrive at such a school, a holistic approach involving various interventions is required.
⚫ Undertaking gender sensitization of parents, community leaders and members, teachers, and girls and boys in order to raise their awareness and understanding of the need to support girls' education.
⚫ Training teachers in the skills for making the teaching and learning processes responsive to the specific needs of girls and boys. Empowering girls with skills for self-confidence, assertiveness, speaking out, decision-making, and negotiation to help them overcome gender-based constraints to their education.
⚫Training the school community to manage sexual maturation issues of both girls and boys with particular emphasis on menstruation management.
⚫ Empowering boys with skills to de-link from gender oppressive attitudes and practices such as machoism, bullying, and sexual affronts, and to develop the self-confidence needed to accept gender equality positively.
⚫ Establishing guidance and counselling desks in order to provide services for the social and psychological development of girls and boys.
⚫ Training teachers and students in guidance and counselling skills.
8. Write the factors determining gender stereotypes.
☐ Gender stereotype consists of beliefs about the psychological traits and characteristics of, as well as the activities appropriate to, men or women. Gender roles are defined by behaviors, but gender stereotypes are beliefs and attitudes about masculinity and femininity. The concepts of gender role and gender stereotype tend to be related. When people associate a pattern of behaviour with either women or men, they may overlook individual variations and exceptions and come to believe that the behaviour is inevitably associated with one gender but not the other. Therefore, gender roles furnish the material for gender stereotypes. Gender stereotypes are very influential; they affect conceptualizations of women and men and establish social categories for gender. These categories represent what people think, and even when beliefs vary from reality, the beliefs can be very powerful forces in judgments of self and others, as the headline story for this chapter showed. Therefore, the history, structure, and function of stereotypes are important topics in understanding the impact of gender on people's lives.
Gender stereotype is a very stable element in consciousness, i.e. psychological and social mechanisms regulating perception and evaluation of certain phenomena, influencing opinions, judgment, attitudes and behaviour. For the stereotype, undifferentiated overall attribution of certain characteristics to all members of the group is typical. It is characterized by emotionality and irrationality, as well as simplistic interpretations of events-as such it is often abused in propaganda. Gender stereotypes have considerable inertia and change only very slowly. Throughout history, the content of Gender stereotypes has changed in relation to historical changes in the relationship between men and women. Yet, still they fulfil the function of maintaining a hierarchical-unequal relationship between the Genders. This reality may offer a partial explanation of the persistence of Gender discrimination, despite changing Gender roles. Masculinity and Femininity are not perceived equally in western society. Disparagement of one sex (more often women) or rejection of any other than stereotypical perceptions of masculinity and femininity is called sexism. Just as with racism, sexism is the manifestation of intolerance. However, while racism means the disparaging of people because of their race or ethnicity, sexism means the disparaging of people because of their sex.
B.ed Notes Gender School and Society