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Overcoming Biases: Gender, Caste, Ethnicity

This document discusses overcoming gender, caste, and ethnic biases in India. It outlines some of the key issues around each, such as gender inequality where girls are often seen as a burden and celebrated less than boys. It also discusses how the caste system creates a social hierarchy that is difficult to overcome. Additionally, it notes that ethnicity can become conflated with physical characteristics and lead to further biases. Some of the recommendations provided include respecting all people equally, sharing household responsibilities between genders, and removing caste identifiers from documents.

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Harapriya Satpathy
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86 views2 pages

Overcoming Biases: Gender, Caste, Ethnicity

This document discusses overcoming gender, caste, and ethnic biases in India. It outlines some of the key issues around each, such as gender inequality where girls are often seen as a burden and celebrated less than boys. It also discusses how the caste system creates a social hierarchy that is difficult to overcome. Additionally, it notes that ethnicity can become conflated with physical characteristics and lead to further biases. Some of the recommendations provided include respecting all people equally, sharing household responsibilities between genders, and removing caste identifiers from documents.

Uploaded by

Harapriya Satpathy
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Overcoming gender, caste and ethnic biases

Gender inequality- Gender inequality is the idea that men and women are not equal and that
gender affects an individual's living experience. In India child sex ratio where for every 1000
boys, there are only 908 girls. Patriarchal norms have marked women as inferior to men. A girl
child is considered a burden and is often not even allowed to see the light of the world even
today, the girl child is discriminated against in most Indian households. The birth of a baby boy
is celebrated with great pomp and ardor, but the birth of a girl child is received with dismay.
According to UNICEF, poverty and cultural beliefs that cause discrimination against girls are
some of the major factors behind gender inequality in education throughout India. Another
barrier to education for girls is a lack of sanitation in schools across the country.
The first and the most important way to overcome gender inequality is by respecting girls not
because they are girls but because they are humans.
1. Begin to actively engage in information seeking about what things mean and how they
should behave in the sense adopting gender-normative behavior and associating gender
with basic stereotypes like girls liking dolls, or boys having short hair. It’s between three
and five years old, when many children attend preschool, that they tend to solidify these
ideas.
2. Sharing household chores and childcare equally.
3. Listen and reflect.
4. Paying the same salary for the same work.

Caste system- The caste system in India is the paradigmatic ethnographic example of caste.
India's caste system is perhaps the world's longest surviving social hierarchy.

Higher caste children are finding it very difficult to get jobs that they previously would have
gotten easily. SCs, Scheduled Tribes (STs) and Other Backwards Classes (OBCs) applying for
government positions don’t need to achieve as high grades as those from higher castes,
therefore fostering feelings of frustration and resentment.

1. There should not be column for caste in any form to be filled up while taking admission in the
school/institution etc.
2. No caste column in any document to be submitted for employment etc
3. Our identity shall be as Indian only.
4. No requirement of caste certificate.

Ethnicity- Ethnicity is similar in concept to race. But while races have often been distinguished
on the basis of physical characteristics, especially skin color, ethnic distinctions generally focus
on such cultural characteristics as language, history, religion, and customs (Montague, 1942).
However, physical and cultural characteristics are often conflated in the identification of racial
and ethnic groups. What begins as an ethnic or cultural distinction often becomes racialized,
and racial groups are often identified, in the public mind, with reference to customs and
behavior.

Underlying causes include structural factors, political factors, economic and social factors, and
cultural and perceptual factors. Elites foster ethnic rivalries to further their own interests. Also,
differential of social mobilization and rate of assimilation, uneven distribution of economic and
political development cause ethnic rivalries

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