Becky Blab

My journey to/through Isha Yoga

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‘Progress’=widening gender gap?

September 10th, 2008 · 3 Comments

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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Tags: culture · gender bias · gender roles and division of labour · human development

India’s female politicians

September 9th, 2008 · No Comments

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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Tags: GOI · Renuka Chowdhury · culture · empowerment · gender bias · gender roles and division of labour · leadership · politics

Harrassment, etc

August 26th, 2008 · No Comments

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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Tags: activism · culture · dowry · economic development · empowerment · gender bias · gender roles and division of labour · girl child · globalisation · mobility · sex and sexuality · trade · violence against women/harrassment