"Now, I know, we have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling, but someday, someone will."
These were Hilary Clinton’s words
while conceding to Donald Trump in the US presidential election 2016. She had breached many glass ceilings in her life but fell short of breaking the
last one.
All these glass ceilings were
built on the biases we all have inherited from our upbringing. Women’s first
responsibility is taking care of the home, husband, and children. Women are not
strong physically to do things that men can. Working women can’t take care of
their families. These are the biases our generation is aware of and many
women in our lives have broken them. However, there are still many deep-rooted
unconscious biases we carry.
These can be against anybody and
anything – gender, race, ethnicity, color, nationality, culture, profession, or
even age. Although each of these biases is strong and affects a large
population of our fellow humans, today let’s only talk about ‘gender’ just to
avoid trivializing the issue.
While things are improving, boys
are still considered the future breadwinners, and girls are homemakers. Their
education is deprioritized vis-à-vis their siblings. Even though several women
broke numerous biases, one at a time, we have a long way to go, as a country,
and as the world.
Although we all have witnessed
visible gender prejudices in India, it is not limited to this country. Unfortunately,
neither higher literacy nor per-capita income has been able to reduce gender prejudices in society. Living in Canada, I have also observed the same
set of biases. These are so subtle that we don’t recognize them as biases,
limiting our thinking, and affecting others’ lives. For instance, we have seen
that girls are mostly expected to learn cheerleading, not play basketball and
this is when the Canadian women's national basketball team is ranked 4th globally.
This is to make an argument that just because you see women succeeding in a
field, doesn’t mean no societal biases obstruct them until most of them
stop pursuing their dreams.
Without deviating too much, let
me conclude with a final point. When we talk about gender bias, we mostly think
about women. This is only our bias that it doesn’t even occur to us that there
is a third group of our society that doesn’t identify as male or female.
It's our responsibility to be
self-aware, identify our biases, and break them to facilitate everybody,
regardless of their gender, to have the same opportunities that men have, and
women fighting for.
