How does traditional male and female roles and gender identities affect the educational choices and employment ambitions of the women of Indian minority and backward communities?

How does traditional male and female roles and gender identities affect the educational choices and employment ambitions of the women of Indian minority and backward communities?

 

Suggested topic/research question:

 

How does traditional male and female roles and gender identities affect the educational choices and employment ambitions of the women of Indian minority and backward communities?

The role of religion, state, family, community etc.

 

• Women are assigned certain status within the community
• The forms of gender socialization in schools can add to female disadvantage in adult life If women lack self confidence in the public sphere and are suppressed in their educational choices and employment ambitions by traditional male and female roles.
• Women by virtue of their patriarchy in the private domain are expected to live and abide by religious norms, their fidelity to religious values and become the basis for the judgment of community identity as a whole.
• Female submissiveness and passivity that create and accept
• Self-images that are based on family stereotypes and social expectations. Particular role specific identities.
• Women are considered to be custodians of cultural identity by virtue of being less assimilated both culturally and linguistically into the wider society.
• Women of minority communities retain cultural separateness to a greater extent than men
• Legal equality granted to minority women by the constitution gets circumscribed by family laws which gives men greater rights in the area of marriage, divorce, maintenance and inheritance, all of which are legitimized in the name of community as a whole.
• Symbolic constructs and tradition intrude upon and affect women’s lives.
• It often imposes several constraints on their ability to assert their interests ignored by the community and identity.
• Important question: Why traditional laws and customs have been held on the so tenaciously in India?
• There is an exceptional resistance to change in this area despite that all other Islamic civil and community laws have been swept aside.
• The state often protects and regulates community and family thus perpetuating forms of patriarchal control over women.
• Personal law is of no help to Muslim women because it undercuts and undermines their rights.
• The substantive inequality of disadvantageous groups in contra distinction to the formal inequality underscored by unequal laws.
• Community constructions of gender roles.
• Complete absence of reform in family laws.
• Personal laws are only for discrimination.
• Women’s lack of rights in law was a crucial factor in maintaining the subordination of men.
• Muslim family laws after independence have remained unchanged.
• Most modern states in the Arab world have sought to expand women’s rights within the framework of Islamic law but such changes have not taken place in India.
• Muslim women’s attitude towards religious identity.

 

References:

1. “Contextualizing gender and identity in contemporary India”.byZoya Hassan
2. Carol C. Mukhopadhyayand Susan Seymour.
3. “Schooling All Children: The Policy implications

of Mothers’ Educational Decision-making”

FibianKavulaniLukalo and Madeleine Arnot

University of Cambridge