Gender bias is an unconscious reality in our lives

Introduction to the world
I find it funny to reflect on the fact that earlier I used to think that the world’s population is equally divided between males and females. No indepth reflection, just a simple application of the probability theory that one reads in schools and colleges. Now I know it is not as simple as that although I wish it would be. In India there are 921 females for 1000 boys, statistics which at first glance might present a fair enough picture but listen to the stories of female infanticide (in rich and poor areas alike), stories of torture for dowry, the restrictions on women and the numbers reflect a greater injustice, but still unable to convey a comprehensive reality of what happened to ‘herstory’ in ‘history’.

What are my first thoughts when it comes to gender? It is the problems of eve teasing and the subjugation of women’s freedom to the whims of the self appointed moral policemen of the Indian political scenario. Well, below is an account of how the gender inequality plays out in each and every dimension of Indian society, below is my story of learning and reflection.


Pink for a girl, Blue for a boy
When was the first time you realized that you are a boy or a girl? As tiny tots do you think we had an ‘Aha’ moment where we realized what our sex is? Do you see the role of those around you or the environment having a hand in your knowledge, and did this realization come in a positive manner? Do a survey in your group and see what various boys or girls have to say to this, also ask the people to reflect on their initial feelings during the realization. How do the feelings of boys compare to that of girls?

One of the first ways that children are ‘engendered’ by their family is in the games that are given to the child. A typical examples that guns are given to boys and dolls to girls. Now as a child who is extremely young and is receiving her or his first toy, do you think it would matter to the child whether it is a gun or a doll. Do you see the child crying and saying in baby language ‘I am a boy, I don’t want a doll, give me a gun, waaaaaah’.

Games help children develop attitude and skills and games is the initial manner in which we help reinforce or create gender stereotypes in children. So it is any wonder why boys love violence (and we all know the wonderful things that are a result of aggression and war) and want blood and gore in their video games and movies and girls become more nurturing and caring.

When it comes to games, alongwith parents the peers of a child restricts him or her freedom, e.g. friends would ridicule a boy to play cricket instead of playing making home with a girls, or a girl would not be allowed to play cricket by her boy friends. Next time when you become a parent, be unbiased and create an empowering environment for your child. Give your child trucks and dolls, encourage the child to play all sorts of games, it will only result in an all round holistic development in your child.

Boys don’t cry
One of the strongest manifestations of identities and stereotypes occurs in our demented social context of gender. I start with one of the extremely prevalent yet still a subtle dimension, that being in the realm of feelings. Where even feelings have a gender specific attribute, isn’t it, ask people to describe females in general and wouldn’t you often hear the word ‘emotional’. In our world even feelings are categorized according to gender for e.g. anger is a masculine trait and fear a feminine one. It is a stereotype enforced in movies and media when they show the strong heroes protecting their weak dainty heroines. This story will talk about media and gender later, but for those who think that I have started with a very weak case and am just being hypercritical or feminist, all I ask is a little patience. Just read through the entire article and then see whether what I have said is of any relevance.

So coming back to the realm of feelings, when it comes to typecasting a certain emotion as feminine or masculine, what is the standard of reference in the first place? When we say women are over emotional, isn’t the standard of reference the reaction of a man. Couldn’t it be said that women are normally emotional and it is men who are cold and lack emotion, I found this an interesting question to ask myself. So what is the typical male and female behaviour then, well are they there? Men can be emotional, and women can be aggressive. Think about it and I am sure a face will come to your mind who reflects the above reality.

Young men = Young women?

Puberty is the coming of age for a young person. But it means different things for boys and girls. In certain societies boys are circumcised and it usually signified as a period of celebration. But when a girl has periods, it is usually looked through the lens of shame and the society shuns as bad or protects. Why does society feel such a need, is it because it has been enforced upon women that she would be the bearer the honour of the family and the community. This attitude only seems to oppress women because a) it places restrictions on her mobility e.g. she cannot go out in the evening because she has to be protected b) she is raped by men who want to dishonour her community. Thus it is her honour that stifles and suppresses her. Thus the relationship between a woman and sex becomes linked to honour rather than pleasure or an act of love.

The protection of their honour might lead a family to consider their social status even more important than their own flesh and blood. Families in India and UK are indulging in large number of honour killings, whereby they kill their own daughter because her path of love takes her away from her family’s path of honour. This is something that I have yet to understand, how can a family regard the view and opinion of society (who are they in the first place, neighbours and community members?) to be so much more important than the freedom and happiness of their child. What is the power of this beast which compels a father, a brother, a mother to burn the person who they have nurtured and cared for throughout her life? And imagine what would be the person going through in her mind as she looks at her family members one last time.

It is the same honour which leads a family in rural India to believe that a child is ready to marry by the time she is 14-15 years. She has attained puberty, and thus her family is concerned, why? Because the girl can get pregnant, either out of choice or out of violence. So her family decides to absolve themselves of the responsibility and get the girl married. And for me till recently I looked at child marriage just through the lens of a law, an illegal act. But it is so much more than that, it’s the absence of adolescence in a young child, she grows from a child to a woman without passing the stage of adolescence. There is absolute no concept of tweens, teens, adolescence in rural communities. Imagine us in Class 8, remember our daily lives, our hobbies and interests and now imagine that you have a spouse and you are giving birth to children. NO, forget being illegal, it is inhuman. Oh! why did society arrive at such a position?

Various cruel practices are enforced upon young girls all over the world. In many communities around the world, the practice of female genital mutilation or circumcision still exists. Young girls between the ages of 13-14 years have their clitoris removed either by a mid wife or a doctor. In Egypt and other countries of Africa, the clitoris is removed through three dreadful manners a) it is cut off by a sharp tool b) in Bedouin tribes, the girl’s legs are bent and her heel is made to grind violently against the clitoris till it becomes completely damaged c) the most intense form, the clitoris of a girl is stitched up leaving only a tiny partition for the girl to urinate or deliver a baby. And all this because the clitoris is a bundle of sensitive nerves that sends extremely strong sexual signals to the body. This is another ghastly example of how a girl’s sexuality has been made to be linked with shame by the society. So what happens in a marriage then, the act of intimacy and love becomes just a painful call for the duty to satisfy the needs of her husband as a ‘good’ woman should do. We need to question who makes such laws, would God ever wish this? If it is written in Holy Scriptures then just go back into history to identify the sex of the person whose hand wrote the scriptures.




Holy be thy name
The next dimension really gets under my skin. Females are not allowed to enter temples when they are menstruating. Strange, if god created the female body and its inherent functions, then the period of menstruation is also creation of God and thus a phenomenon of celebration, definitely not a reason to bar women from entering temples. Why is the period of menstruation conceived to be something shameful? It is this blood that is signified as shameful, which nourishes the child when a woman is pregnant. An act which is described as a miracle in several societies and one of the primary reasons for which women are revered. A grand irony isn’t it. In Nepal, an adolescent girl is worshipped as a goddess and is given lavish treatment, but once she attains puberty, she becomes impure and then is cast away in a life full of isolation. You only have to see pictures of the drastic changes in her environment before you can even begin to imagine what kind of impact the change will have on a young mind.


SEX SELLS

The Media is so important in the context of gender stereotypes. It is powerful because of its outreach i.e. it reaches so many houses and so many people and that too consistently over a period of time. Thus they have an enormous power to guide and influence the way people think and behave at all levels.

In various advertisements you'll notice that women are much more likely than men to serve a decorative function. Women recline in seductive clothing, caressing a liquor bottle, or they drape themselves coyly on the nearest male. Now this is dangerous as one of the most problematic aspects of the gender is the view of women as sex objects. And this creates so many problems related to crimes against women such as eve teasing, molestation, violence.
But women are underrepresented in the Media. Music videos feature roughly twice as many males as females (Sommers-Flanagan, Sommers-Flanagan, & Davis, 1993). Women are not seen much, but they are heard even less. For example, the next time you see a television advertisement, notice whose voice of authority is extolling the product's virtues.
There is a predominant male authority in media. "Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth." - Simone de Beauvoir
The media’s voice of authority is most often that of a middle-aged, professional male. These men dominate the opinion-shaping forums of talk radio, newspaper journalism, and television news and commentary, and male voices are those most commonly heard in television and radio commercials.
And now that in today’s world young people are so exposed to media, it is not a surprise that young people emulate habits and behaviour that are linked to older people such as dressing provocatively and engaging in sexual behaviour. Thus young people are engaging in mature behaviour without cultivating the responsibility to think through their decisions. Eg young girls wearing thongs, engaging in sexual activity at a much young age e.g. The American movie Thirteen depicts real life stories of the risky behaviour that 13-14 year olds indulge in, young girls of the same age group shared in an Oprah Winfrey show that they believed it ok to perform oral sex on boys at parties and in relationships. And you can’t blame young people also, because the influence of media is so strong and scientific that definitely young, fresh, uncultivated would get influenced. So both in India and USA, the period of adolescence is becoming non-existential by tangible (parents) and intangible (media) influences.

But the need for the media to continue in this line needs to be analysed. What media is selling is titillation or eyeball capturing images. And with titillation, the audience does not need clever, intricate, culture-based scripts or convincing acting. This help in selling volumes of a product or gathering attention of the viewer. And this makes business sense because males have so much purchasing power. If the purchasing power was in the hands of women, it would not have made any business sense to sell images. Thus it is all the more important that we create financial empowerment for women because they would not support such representation in the media and it would eventually result in the lowering of crimes against women.
So gender biases are reinforced by media. But why should they not be? The role of the advertising media is not to create social education or gender equality. In their ad they want to position their product in an environment that reflects society. And the creative team media designs the ad on the behalf of a client, who is focused on getting eyeballs and profits. So we cannot blame the media alone, it is also their client, the company and the people who are in the charge of the product and the company. For example in the Fair and Lovely ads, we get carried away by the design of the ad and instigate the advertising agency, forgetting the company and the team that created the product in the first place. There is great need to educate young people about the media and provide them with the frameworks to be educated consumers of the media. We should also tell young people that when they get into the profession of media advertising or a product based company, they should not perpetuate such stereotyping.

And when in the corporate industry you have many more men and women, such stereotypes will only continue. It is because the men in the company conceiving the product and positioning will have the conventional stereotypical attitudes and the male copywriters in the advertising agencies will create ads that sends stereotypical messages.
Yes, in the current scenario more and more women are entering the industry but this phenomenon has yet to trickle into the management team which takes the decisions for the product design and steers the marketing strategy. As long as women do not enter into the management board of the company, the effect of more women getting into the industry will not be 100% effective.

So which are the industries that benefit from gender stereotypes? They are primarily the diet and cosmetic industries. Researchers report that women’s magazines have ten and one-half times more ads and articles promoting weight loss than men’s magazines do, and over three-quarters of the covers of women’s magazines include at least one message about how to change a woman’s bodily appearance—by diet, exercise or cosmetic surgery. By presenting an ideal body that is difficult to achieve and maintain, the cosmetic and diet product industries are assured of sustained demand resulting in growth and profits. Studies indicate that women who are insecure about their bodies are more likely to buy beauty products, new clothes, and diet aids.

The incessant projection of such unhealthy images has severe impact on today’s youth. More and more individuals are concerned about their body image i.e. an individual’s concerns and perceptions about their own physical appearance. With the media e.g. (music videos, magazines, movies and TV) continuously pumping images of the bodies of unhealthy thin girls it is creating an unnatural aspiration for women across the world. It becomes difficult for females to achieve any kind of contentment or satisfaction with respect to their bodies. This negative perception seems to happen more with girl than boys. This desire to be thin despite being healthy starts in girls at a very young age. Girls at the age of nine are going on diets to maintain a thin look.
The American research group Anorexia Nervosa & Related Eating Disorders, Inc. says that one out of every four college-aged women uses unhealthy methods of weight control—including fasting, skipping meals, excessive exercise, laxative abuse, and self-induced vomiting. And the Canadian Fitness and Lifestyle Research Institute warns that weight control measures are being taken by girls as young as nine (class 5). American statistics are similar. In 2003, Teen magazine reported that 35 per cent of girls 6 to 12 years old (class 3-class7) have been on at least one diet, and that 50 to 70 per cent of normal weight girls believe they are overweight.
And since this exposure happens in an adolescent mind, the mind is also not wise enough to critically analyze the signals that it is receiving. Magazines and advertisements are marketed to help women "better themselves" by providing information and products and women read these magazines with the hope that if they follow the advice given, they will be more acceptable and attractive. This depicts a certain lack of personal security and accurate information.

There are a few theories is that why women internalize the messages that are given in the society and are not able to reject them on a large scale. One is that humans by nature have a tendency to compare themselves with other human being and rely on their comparison for their high or low sense of self esteem. The industry capitalizes on this human trait and always sends images of bodies that have a perceived aspirational value so that women buy their products. The impact of such exposure leads to dissatisfaction with weight, unhealthy eating habits, over-exercising, surgery.

The second is that because such images are so prevalent and consistent in the media that the audience believes that the images are part of a reality, ie the normal state of a women’s body. Thus anything different from this ‘constructed reality’ becomes unhealthy in their minds.

But I also came across an interesting contradictory story of whether it makes business sense to pursue gender stereotypes. Advertisers believe that thin models sell products. When the Australian magazine New Woman recently included a picture of a heavy-set model on its cover, it received a truckload of letters from grateful readers praising the move. But its advertisers complained and the magazine returned to featuring bone-thin models. Advertising Age International concluded that the incident "made clear the influence wielded by advertisers who remain convinced that only thin models spur the sales of beauty products." Again I am sure that these advertisers surely belong to the diet and cosmetic companies. The media needs to sell an idea, and that is why they need to simulate the ‘real scenario’ i.e. society in their advertisements. On the other hand if a repressed society is exposed to positive images in the media, they become more mature and open. Thus society and media are so interdependent on each other.

I don’t know whether media can ever dictate the lifestyles or culture of a community or is it the privilege of a company possessing tremendous financial clout and power. Maybe both of them have a hand to play, the company being the thinker and the media being the executioner. Although media and corporate are a potent team, society have rejected their messages in the past, example popular opinion persuaded Pepsi to focus on health drinks. So it would be interesting to study the various examples in which society has rejected the popular lifestyle choices that have been projected by companies and media.

It starts from Home
I would like to conclude the article from where it started, from where all our lives start, i.e. our home. Gender stereotypes are introduced to a person as soon as they are born, whether it is the colour of their room or the toys given to them. Parents would focus on making their girl child look pretty and beautiful and are ok if their male child gets dirty. Thus when boys and girls grow up, they themselves reinforce the gender stereotypes i.e. girls are focusing more on their looks and dresses and boys grow up into roughhousing, playing outside, and getting dirty. A lot of the messages that are given to a child by his or her parent build gender specific identities in the child as he or she grows up. The media just revolves around the construct that we have created in our homes e.g. in a magazine targeted at teenage girls ie. Seventeen, an analysis of the articles demonstrated that only 7% of the contents concerned career planning, independence, and other self-development topics, in contrast, 46% of the contents concerned appearance