Becky Blab

Some new research featured in the NYT on the gender gap contends counterintuitively that more traditional societies have smaller gender differences than modern ones.
For evolutionary psychologists, the bad news is that the size of the gender gap in personality varies among cultures. For social-role psychologists, the bad news is that the variation is going in [...]

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The TOI has an interesting response to Sarah Palin’s nomination: the examination of political tokenism of women in India.
“A patriarchal ethos dominates both the societies, American and Indian, but they operate in different ways. In India, despite the patriarchal ethos, powerful women leaders have emerged,” says political scientist Imtiaz Ahmed.
The most famous examples are BSP [...]

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The Washington Post had an in-depth piece on Indian women’s status. It starts off discussing ‘eve-teasing’, i.e. harrassment, but then delves into the whole range of issues from dowry to sex-selective abortion:
For India’s middle-class urban women, the past decade has brought unprecedented opportunities to advance in a social order long dominated by men. But a [...]

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Nita has a lengthy post on “the ultra conservatism that is strangling the freedom of dress in Indian society today”.
If all those things which make a sari more comfortable and natural are considered “immodest” what’s the use of the sari anyway? No wonder the younger generation is giving up on the sari, except when it [...]

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Two recent articles from the New York times have grabbed my attention. From Monday, My Son, the Blogger: An M.D. Trades Medicine for Apple Rumors discusses how one blogger has traded his lucrative career in medicine to focus full-time on his equally lucrative hobby blog.

But the prestige is not distributed equally among the genders. Blogging’s [...]

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