Tomorrow, the World Economic Forum’s India Economic Summit will begin in New Delhi. Between discussions on agriculture and infrastructure is the plenary session titled simply: Investing in Girls, Investingin Development—The Girl Effect.
Word power: The World Economic Forum measured the gap in the education of boys and girls; in India, that gap is very wide. Bharath Sai / Mint
Gender is the focus of several recent surveys, including the Shriver Report, WEF’s Global Gender Gap Report 2009 and a survey by the Dubai Foundation for Women and Children, which plans to measure the extent of domestic violence and child abuse in the emirate. WEF’s gender report measured the gap between men and women using the usual four factors: economic opportunities, education, health and political participation. Nordic countries came out tops and India fell in the bottom quartile.
The problem with gender reports is that while they can help governments decide policy, and nudge countries to perform better, they offer little to women in terms of how to live or improve their lives. They don’t answer the question: Say you are faced with a thousand little girls, what message would you give them?
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I know: It depends on the sample. Well, let’s narrow it down by country and region. Let’s limit it to India. I wouldn’t presume to lecture rural girls given that I know little about their lifestyle. So let’s narrow it to urban Indian teenage girls which in itself is a large enough sample. What would you tell them?
There are macro messages. Learn to love without losing yourself is a key one, given a woman’s congenital desire for harmony; difficulty with saying “No”; and her penchant for spreading herself too thin in the emotion department. There are micro messages about learning self-defence, and managing hormonal cycles. But the bulk of it has to do with nuances, and gender parity reports, as George Bush famously said of himself, “Don’t do nuance”.