Time for change, time to end gender prejudice

My house help came home last week looking forlorn and on enquiring he told me that his daughter had her third baby that morning back in his village back in India. He said that it was a girl again. His distress and misery following the birth of his granddaughter takes me back to the birth of my own daughter, the news and her arrival had been reason enough for celebration. Here is a tiny baby whose only fault is that she is a girl born into a family whose joy of parenting is conditioned by the child’s gender. In a world where women are a leading force of change, breaking through the glass ceiling, heading major organisations and thriving in the field of sport, too, it is unfortunate that the girl child is still seen as a liability and will suffer neglect and abuse throughout her life. It is easy to blame it on the country or its culture, but this is the same country that has a girl as young as 20 years old as the head of her village in Gujarat and the same country that dedicates nine days in prayers and worship to the Hindu deity Durga. The fact that girls are seen as an economic burden due to the illegal dowry system that is still vehemently practiced by people up and down the class-caste ladder, and boys are seen as a source of income or the fact that it is the son who will finally care for his parents when the daughter is married off into another family. It reinforces that even the smallest change can be brought about only with the change in the “rules” and, hence, the mindsets that have been followed unquestionably through the generations. Education and strict laws against discrimination are the only chance to help these women and start the change to move away from a society that is rooted in gender and caste prejudice.

The reader is a homemaker based in Dubai.