‘‘Our society is still a male-dominated society.’’ Explain the statement with the help of examples.

In our society, women still lag much behind men despite some improvements since Independence. Ours is still a male-dominated, patriarchal society.

Women face disadvantage, discrimination, and oppression in various ways:

• The literacy rate among women is only 54 percent compared to 76 percent among men. Similarly, a smaller proportion of girl students go for higher studies. Even though girls perform as well as the boys, the former drop out because parents prefer to spend their resources on their boys’ education rather than spending equally on their sons and daughters.
  
• Women in the highly paid and valued jobs are still very small. On an average, an Indian woman works one hour more than an average man every day. Yet much of her work is not paid and therefore often not valued.
  
• The Equal Remuneration Act, of 1976 provides that equal wages should be paid to equal work. However in almost all areas of work, from sports and cinema to factories and fields, women are paid less than men, even when both do exactly the same work.
  
• In many parts of India, parents prefer to have sons and find ways to have the girl child aborted before she is born. Such sex-selective abortion led to a decline in child sex ratio (number of girl children per thousand boys) in the country to merely 919. This ratio has fallen below 850 or even 800 in some States.