The Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen

Author:Amartya Sen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141964799
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2010-05-14T04:00:00+00:00

11

Women and Men*

Many Faces of Gender Inequality

Inequality between women and men can appear in many different forms – it has many faces.1 Gender disparity is, in fact, not one affliction but a multitude of problems. Sometimes the different asymmetries are quite unrelated to each other. Indeed, there may be no significant inequality in one sphere but a great deal of inequality in another. For example, Japan has no particular gender bias in nutrition or health care or school education, but men do seem to have considerable relative advantage in securing high leadership positions in administration or business.

However, in other cases, gender inequality of one type tends to encourage and sustain gender inequality of other kinds. Consequential analysis can then be critically important even within the large corpus of gender relations in general, in order to examine and scrutinize how the different aspects of gender inequality relate to each other. For while gender inequality has many faces, these are not independent (like those in the austere image of Brahma in early Indian iconography). Rather, they speak to each other and sometimes strongly encourage one another. For example, when women lack decisional power within the family, which amounts to a deprivation of women’s effective agency, this can also adversely affect their own well-being. The two kinds of deprivation may not only move together – be ‘covariant’ – but they may be linked with each other through causal connections.

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