Gender sensitivity issues and women empowerment

 Gender consciousness is everywhere.
 We enforce gender specific roles consciously or
unconsciously.
 Ex – when we console a crying boy by saying
‘don’t cry like a girl’ -we are doing gender bias.
 That is , we are expecting and at the same time
imposing different sets of values on the basis of
sex. Gender influence, how we think, act, feel
and communicate.

 Gender :
 The difference between women and men within
the same household and within and between
cultures that are socially and culturally
constructed and change over time.
 These difference are reflected in roles,
responsibilities,access to resources, constraints,
opportunities, needs, perceptions, view etc . held
by both women and men. ( Moser C. 1993)

Gender Bias –
 Actions against women or men based on the
perceptions that the other sex is not equal
and does not have the same rights

Gender equality :
 A term which reflects an equal sharing of
power between women and men, in their
equal access to education, health,
administrative and managerial positions,
equally pay for work and equal pay for work
of equal value and equal seats in parliament
among others.

 The pairing of the two concepts of women‘s
empowerment and gender equality into one,
implicitly recognizes that gender equality
and women‘s empowerment are two sides of
the same coin.
 Progress toward gender equality requires
women‘s empowerment and women‘s
empowerment requires increases in gender
equality

 Ultrasound tests are being widely used for sex
selection, with sex selection being more evident for
the wealthiest women.
 Couples typically stop having children once they
have the desired number of sons.

Children’s school attendance:
 Only two-thirds of girls and three-fourths of
boys age 6-17 years are attending schools. The
sex ratio of children attending school is 889
girls per 1,000 boys.
 School dropout beyond primary school is a
major problem for both girls and boys.

Literacy and educational attainment among
adults:
 Gender disparity in literacy is much greater
in rural areas
 Forty-one percent of women and 18% of men
age 15-49 have never been to school.
 Educational attainment remains very low:
even among the 20-29 age group.

 The average age at marriage for women is only
17 years.
 Age at marriage for women and men increases
with education and wealth.
 However, age at marriage increases more with
education for women than it does for men.
 16% of married women age 15-49 are married to
men who are 10 or more years older than them.

 Women age between 15-49 are about half as
likely as men in the same age group to be
employed: 43% vs. 87%.

 For many women, employment is largely a
result of economic necessity.
 Even with controls for education, age, and
wealth, marriage is negatively associated
with a woman’s likelihood of being employed
and is positively associated with a man’s
likelihood of being employed.

 Female household heads have less education than
male household heads.
 Female-headed households are more likely to be
economically vulnerable than male-headed
households.

 Women have lower access to media than men.
 Women’s freedom of movement is severely
hindered: only one in three are allowed to go
alone to the market, the health centre, and
outside the community.
 A majority of women do not have any money of
their own that they can use as they wish.

 Although most men believe that husbands and
wives should make decisions jointly, but it is yet
the husband who has the major say in most
decisions

 Women’s control over own earnings increases
with education and wealth, but men’s control
remains consistently high in all educational and
wealth categories.
 Participation in decisions about the use of
spouses’ earnings increases with education and
wealth for women

 About two in five currently married women
age 15-49 have experienced spousal violence
in their current marriage.

a. Child vaccination and nutritional status:
 Girls are less likely to be fully immunized than
boys
 Children’s likelihood of being fully immunized
increases with mothers’ education.
 A higher proportion of children are underweight
if their mother is employed than if she is not.

b.Adult nutritional status
 More than one in three women are too thin.
Among couples, wives are more likely than
husbands to be too thin.

c.Modern contraceptive use among married
women:
 The likelihood of women using a modern
contraceptive method is higher for women who
are employed and having higher education.

 Women empowerment in simple words can
be understood as giving power to women to
decide for their own lives or inculcating such
abilities in them so that they could be able
to find their rightful place in the society

 According to UNITED NATIONS, women
empowerment has five components;
1. generating women’s sense of self worth
2.Womens right to have and to determine their choices
3.Womens right to have or access to equal
opportunities and all kinds of resources
4. Women’s right to have the power to regulate and
control their own lives, within and outside the home
5. Women’s ability to contribute in creating a more
social and economic order

 The MDG’s centred towards promoting gender equality
and empowering women: “Eliminate gender disparity
in primary and secondary education, preferably by
2005, and in all levels of education by no later than
2015”.
 The Government of India MDG Report 2009 notes,
“participation of women in employment and decision-
making remains far less than that of men, and the
disparity is not likely to be eliminated by 2015.”.

 To eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
 To achieve universal primary education
 To promote gender equality and empower
women
 To reduce child mortality
 To improve maternal health
 To combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
 To ensure environmental sustainability
 To develop a global partnership of development

 The Ministry for Women & Child Development was
established as a department of the Ministry of Human
Resource Development in the year 1985 to drive the holistic
development of women and children in the country.
 In 2006 this department was given the status of a Ministry,
with the powers to:-
 Formulate plans, policies and programmes; enacts/ amends
legislation, guiding and coordinating the efforts of both
governmental and non-governmental organisations working in
the field of Women and Child Development.

 The Ministry is also implementing the Swayamsidha
programme – an integrated scheme for the empowerment
of women at a total cost of Rs. 116.30 Crores.
 Core to this programme will be the establishment of
women’s self-help groups which will empower women to
have increased access to all kinds of resources that they
are denied, in addition to increasing their awareness and
skills.
 This programme will benefit about 9,30,000 women with
the setting up of 53,000 self-help groups, 26,500 village
societies and 650 block societies.

 The National Commission for Women is a
Department within the Ministry of Women and Child
Development.
 It was set up exclusively to help women via the
Constitution – by reviewing Legal and Constitutional
safeguards for women, recommending remedial
legislative measures, by facilitating quick redressal
of grievances and by advising the Government of
India on all policy matters affecting women.

 The Women’s Bill in April 2010, which gives 33.3%
reservation for women in all levels of Indian politics,
took 14 years after its introduction to finally pass by
the Rajya Sabha (the upper house of parliament).
 The reservation bill will ensure 181 out of the 543
seats at the Parliament level
 Currently women occupy less than 10% of seats in the
national Parliament.

 Formulation of many specific laws in order to
protect the rights of women;
 The equal remuneration act, 1976
 The Dowry prohibition act, 1961
 The immoral Traffic ( Prevention) act, 1956
 The maternity benefit act, 1961
 The medical termination of pregnancy act, 1971
 The prohibition of child marriage act, 2006
 The pre conception and Pre natal diagnostic
techniques act 1994
 The sexual Harassment of women at work place
act, 2013

 To truly understand what is women empowerment, there
needs to be a sea-change in the mind-set of the people in
the country. Not just the women themselves, but the men
have to wake up to a world that is moving towards equality
and equity. It is better that this is embraced earlier rather
than later, for our own good.
 Swami Vivekananda once said “arise away and stop not
until the goal is reached”. Thus our country should thus be
catapulted into the horizon of empowerment of women
and revel in its glory.
 We have a long way to go, but we will get there someday.

 Now a day’s men are coming for nursing and
there are only few male faculty role models in
nursing.
 Many nursing text books refers to the
compassonate care giver nurse as ‘she’ and make
no mention of the male gender, except as sickly,
demanding patient’s.
 This stereotype suffers that male nurses are
incapable of or less capable of caring,
compassion and nurturing than female nurses.

Classroom prejudice –
 In classroom setting, male nursing students have
encountered gender discrimination in the vary text
books.
 Some textbooks will make no mention of male gender
other than a ‘patient’.
 Every picture seemed to identify the nurse as the
caring female individual while the patient was always
a ‘male in need of care’

 Workplace prejudice –
 In the work place male nurses are being stereotyped as
the typical male who may be viewed as insensitive.
 When male nurse make into the supervisory rank,
gender discrimination become more apparent again as
some female nurses resent taking orders from males.
 Gender discrimination is also apparent with male
nursing teachers in hospitals as they are not allowed in
certain areas of hospitals like labour room and post
partum,it is also a problem for male nursing students
also.

Do men really make a difference in nursing:
 Researchers shown that “ male nurses are less tolerant of verbal
abuse than women have been in the past”
 This attitude have opened the eyes of the doctors that, it is not ok
to treat any nurse with disrespect.
 Men are more capable in handling emergency situations than
females.
 Men are usually drown to the technological aspect of acute care
specialities and are challenged by the machines in that unit.
 Men in nursing also have an economic advantage. American
national sample survey of registered nurses reported that male
nurses average 12% more of earning than females

Hidden advantages of the men in nursing
 Less competition from the same sex, because of
less number
 Better opportunities to employ leadership
process and develop leadership skills
 They will be viewed as traditional bread winner
of the families and are considered more
permanent, reliable employees.

Gender sensitivity issues and women empowerment

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Gender sensitivity issues and women empowerment