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The stretch in gender equity
Is gender equity the same as a bias for women?Is the preservation of a male preserve a bad thing, but not the other way round? We’d like to pose the question in the context of a report that The Doon School’s board of governors is considering whether the famous all-boys (since 1936) school should admit girls. The move is widely seen as an instance of the winds of gender equity blowing through the gates of this ‘male bastion’ and a blow against a policy that belongs to the dinosaur age.
At one level this is an entirely correct view, though the fact is there are a number of educational institutions that have been admitting only girls for decades. But no one has yet criticised them on grounds of gender equity. In fact the usual defence is that given the millennia of discrimination against women, such an attitude is not only understandable, but needed for some time to come. However, there is another unintended consequence of this. Take Delhi University’s master’s degree course in psychology. There are, it appears, three males in a class of 76. A key reason: of the 16 DU colleges offering a bachelor’s degree in the subject, 14 are all-women. The other two are co-educational and not exactly in the first-tier of public perception on well-regarded colleges. Put another way, if a Delhi boy has an interest in psychology and would like to study it, the doors are effectively shut.
Such a situation hasn’t excited much comment or concern. It is possible there is a popular perception, among women, if not among some men, that reverse discrimination makes sense for at least the medium future, if not a generation or two, or even more. We have, after all, adopted such a policy on castes, agreeing that the way to the goal of less discrimination in future is by doing much more of it now. There are parts of the country where the policy was begun around 100 years before. If thus with the caste-downtrodden, why not with the gender-downtrodden?
And yet, one wonders if the answer to past injustice is necessarily some present injustice. If you wouldn’t get more male involvement for gender equity if you didn’t also insist that the seesaw must first tip long enough in the opposite direction. And if arguing this necessarily makes you a dinosaur.
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