The history of science is replete with thousands of examples of the way modern or empirical science was opposed by well-entrenched forces in society at any given time. Some of the oldest cultures have also resisted scientific ideas based on their own interpretation of the physical world.
There have been innumerable debates and controversies about the power of scientific inventions and concepts since the Vedic times. At the Indian Science Congress held in Mumbai in 2015, there was a separate session on “ancient sciences through Sanskrit” that drew a lot of fire from rationalists and modern scientists. It was alleged that the session was organised just to please the new political dispensation in Delhi as the Prime Minister usually inaugurates the Science Congress every year. Many of the speakers on the Vedic sciences drew ridicule for not being able to provide any rational explanation of the phenomena they were trying to demonstrate. Subsequent Science Congresses have disbanded the ancient sciences session.
India was home to ancient universities or seats of higher learning of Nalanda and Takshashila that were either destroyed or decayed a long time ago. However, the government of India resurrected Nalanda, but the project is now mired in political infighting. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, the first head has resigned. No one really knows what goes on at this university.
In the early part of the Christian era, science was strongly opposed. In the middle ages, western Europe was in scientific darkness. The Roman empire had no interest in science, and after its fall there was scientific barrenness. However, later, the universities in England and other European countries emerged as leaders in scientific research. By early twentieth century, North American centres of science, engineering and technology developed at the speed of light; the rest of the world has been struggling to catch up with the West in science even to this day.
The ancient church was vehemently opposed to modern science and even persecuted scientists like Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Halley, Darwin, Hubble and Bertrand Russell. The church has also opposed modern social sciences by promoting and silently supporting slavery, anti-Semitism, witch hunts, sexual repression, censorship and the inquisition. The church has strongly promoted wars and capital punishment for even small misdemeanours. This kind of opposition to sciences in the church is called apologetics. Even today, fundamentalist Christians in the United States believe in the theory of special creation which states that Earth was created 7,000 years ago.
They completely disbelieve in evolution and support the theory of intelligent design. Many modern-day Quran-thumping Islamic preachers also do not believe in evolution and preach the same with all fervour in their speeches around the world. There are many extreme right-wing Republican congressmen who strive hard to cut funding to science agencies.
What has happened in the present era of scientific dissonance is the emergence of highly organised and orchestrated anti-science movements aided and abetted by modern information and communication technology and so much funding that these movements have become a multi-million-dollar protest industry. The role of non-governmental organisations and the so-called civic society organisations keep a selective anti-science movement boiling. Some of the science and technology they seek to ban or be kept under wraps are nuclear technology, modern biotechnology and vaccines. They fight against some modern sciences so vehemently that polarisation is on the rise and even reasonable people have started to doubt scientific reason.
One branch of science called eugenics, which deals with the study of human genetics, came to earn a really bad name for good reason at the hands of Hitler’s Nazis. The Nazi doctor Josef Mengele conducted experiments on human beings at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The eugenic movement started in California long before the Nazis adopted it as state policy with the intention of creating a race of superior people in Germany. The Rockefellers even funded the German eugenic movement. It is these kinds of misuse of science by wicked people that really heightened the anti-science movement in Europe, which is alive and kicking even to this day. The California eugenic movement died out, and today it is a state with some of the finest institutions for scientific research and development.
In Stanley Kubrick’s comic masterpiece Dr Strangelove, Jack Ripper, an American general who orders a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, had his own paranoid worldview; he believed that fluoridation of water was a monstrous communist plot. Anti-fluoridation conspiracy theories are now stuff of comedy. Some Americans don’t like the idea of government adding chemicals to water, forgetting that water is also a chemical – dihydrogen monoxide. The scientific and medical consensus is that fluoride, a natural mineral, at low concentrations protects dental enamel, prevents tooth decay and promotes public dental health. But the citizens of Portland town have banned fluoridation of water in their community because they don’t believe the scientific consensus.
In today’s world, modern sciences like the safety of fluoridation, vaccines, climate change and GMOs are furiously opposed, much against the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Using their own sources of information, which is called parallel science, and the interpretations of their “scientific experts”, activists deny the mainstream expert scientific consensus. Doubting science has become pop culture. There is a whole bunch people who don’t believe that Apollo moon landing was real. A Hindu priest in Varanasi those days even said Americans don’t know our Chandrama, and they have landed somewhere else, calling it moon.
There are some farmers in Uttar Pradesh who believe that water supplied from hydro-electric dams is useless for agriculture as the dam has sucked all its power to create electricity and then sent down to them for use. Similarly, many NGOs started an aggressive anti-nuclear power movement in Kudankulam. That movement is not totally dead; it will raise its head again when other nuclear power plants are to be commissioned. A farmer leader, the late Professor Nanjundaswamy, used to say young girls working in the Bt cotton fields attain puberty much earlier than normal. Three NGOs in then Andhra Pradesh – ANTHRA, CSD, and DDS – started propagating a false story that hundreds and thousands of sheep died in the state for eating Bt cotton leaves, the only approved GM crop in India. None of these stories gained much currency in those years but did sufficient damage to stall further approvals of GM crops in India.
If these opponents of science and technology are not aware, they should know that science is what is running this world and it is all-pervasive. Even the opponents are beneficiaries of modern science and technology, but they militate to keep it away from the most deserving and the needy. They create non-existent and imaginary hazards and risks. The Ebola virus is known not to mutate to change its way of transmission in human beings, but a new type of “airborne Ebola” was created on the internet just to scare people. The irony is that opponents of science use information technology to attack biotechnology, both of which are cutting-edge technologies. Those who oppose GM crops for want of, in their view, sufficient scientific proof, wholeheartedly accept the scientific proof of global warming.
This duplicitousness of the opponents of science is what creates needless anxiety and fear in the minds of the public. Science is a series of methods to demonstrate natural reality by way of providing evidence that behaves according to the laws of nature. People have a challenging time understanding this methodology, and therefore get swayed easily by mischief makers. Whenever science goes up against human feelings and emotions, science always loses.
That’s how it has become difficult to convince people of science even though they all benefit from it in their day-to-day lives. Scientific truths are not self-evident, but they have been deduced from experimentation and critical observation which calls for people to exercise their brains. That’s where people give up and take the easy route and fall prey to the machinations of the anti-activists. People sub-consciously cling on to their intuitions. Even educated people have reservations about science.
A bunch of masters degree students in the Fergusson College in Pune, when asked if they eat DNA when they have their food, were unable to answer with any confidence. When such is the plight of students of modern biology and biotechnology, it is no surprise that anti-science activists exploit this kind of weakness to press their case. That’s how public opinion is created. These anti-science activists have done such a terrific job of creating doubt about science that even politicians have fallen for it all over the developing world. It is these ill-informed politicians who come in the way of making regulatory policies that affect the implementation of modern technologies. Unfortunately, scientists have done precious little to influence the minds of the same politicians. The result is that many progressive technologies are in a limbo.
In a scientifically advanced country like the United States, some of the far-right politicians of the Republican Party don’t want to fund research on embryonic stem cells and studies in reproductive biology and many of them don’t believe in global warming, and they sit on committees that decide funding for such researches. Indian parliamentarians during the previous regime also produced a scientifically retarded report on GM crops, heavily influenced by the virulent anti-GMO NGO Greenpeace, and submitted it to parliament and not one member of the committee had any inkling of the science or technology. The net result is, for the past seven years, approvals of GM crops have been completely suspended.
In addition to anti-science activists, some industries are also involved in peddling their faulty technology just to sell and make money. The well-known example is the more than 60-year-old stand that tobacco is harmless. The tobacco industry was lying for too long. Such blatant misrepresentations by the industry also erodes confidence in science and technology. The fossil fuel industry is also campaigning against climate change and that does not help the case of good science.
The news media also plays a key role by giving space and time, in the name of objectivity or neutrality, to mavericks, naysayers, soothsayers, professional demagogues and table thumpers.
Scientific enterprise has its own faults in its so-called peer review system. Many faulty and incorrect scientific results fall through the cracks of the peer review system. However, there is no better alternative to this system that by and large catches faulty science up to 95 to 98 per cent. In fact, if one were to critically examine the progress of science in the last 200 years, the peer review system has done a commendable job of advancing credible scientific progress, the benefits of which we all enjoy today.
The boring truth is, scientific progress, most of the time, takes place incrementally, which is why according to a Pew poll, only 40 per cent of Americans accept that global warming is due to human activity. A third of Americans believe humans have existed in their present form since time began. These are members of the anti-evolution league.
The polarisation on science is such that there does not seem to be any kind of middle ground because both groups live in their echo chambers, reinforcing their own beliefs. But the scientific facts are that GMOs are safe, climate is warming, vaccines prevent unwanted deaths. The scientific enterprise also causes confusion in the minds of people by publishing faulty papers like vaccines are linked to autism and GM crops cause terrible cancers, both of which were published the British medical journal Lancet. The vaccines and autism study was retracted by the journal and the report has been definitively debunked by scientists, but some of the most influential people in America are spearheading the anti-vaccine movement, and have even gone to the extent of bombing laboratories and issuing death threats to vaccine scientists who had to be provided protection.
In case of the safety of GM crops, Lancet published the paper by Seralini et al that had been debunked by the mainstream scientific community after it was published in a journal of toxicology and then retracted by it. Thus, even editors of scientific journals sometimes try to please the anti-science crowd in the name of objectivity. A scientific journal in biological sciences, then published by the prestigious Indian Institute of Science, injected itself into the great Indian GM debate and invited both proponents and opponents to write articles to make their case. Scientists did not respond to the call, but the anti-scientist-in-chief did, and the result was that his scientific nonsense prevailed just because it got published in the journal without any peer review.
The editor escaped his responsibility by saying that scientists had an opportunity to rebut and they chose not to. But, why would a journal publish something on GM crops, an issue that is hotly debated, without the benefit of sound peer review? It is due to this kind of naïve attitude to please all that scientists themselves do disservice to science.
The last word is about science teaching that starts in schools. It is taught as a set of facts and not as a set of constantly evolving methods of reasoning. Unless schools and colleges inculcate the scientific spirit, the chances of the public learning about science looks dim. Science is progressing rapidly and technological advances are breathtaking, so the challenge of communicating science becomes even more onerous and daunting.
The scientific community must train a new generation of communicators who are trained properly in science, but also know how to resonate with the public. Until such change happens, scientists will have to contend with the anti-science lobby and fight them as vigorously as possible on all fronts.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.
On March 31, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released its annual Gender Gap Report 2021. The Global Gender Gap report is an annual report released by the WEF. The gender gap is the difference between women and men as reflected in social, political, intellectual, cultural, or economic attainments or attitudes. The gap between men and women across health, education, politics, and economics widened for the first time since records began in 2006.
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]No need to remember all the data, only pick out few important ones to use in your answers.
The Global gender gap index aims to measure this gap in four key areas : health, education, economics, and politics. It surveys economies to measure gender disparity by collating and analyzing data that fall under four indices : economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment.
The 2021 Global Gender Gap Index benchmarks 156 countries on their progress towards gender parity. The index aims to serve as a compass to track progress on relative gaps between women and men in health, education, economy, and politics.
Although no country has achieved full gender parity, the top two countries (Iceland and Finland) have closed at least 85% of their gap, and the remaining seven countries (Lithuania, Namibia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Rwanda, and Ireland) have closed at least 80% of their gap. Geographically, the global top 10 continues to be dominated by Nordic countries, with —Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden—in the top five.
The top 10 is completed by one country from Asia Pacific (New Zealand 4th), two Sub-Saharan countries (Namibia, 6th and Rwanda, 7th, one country from Eastern Europe (the new entrant to the top 10, Lithuania, 8th), and another two Western European countries (Ireland, 9th, and Switzerland, 10th, another country in the top-10 for the first time).There is a relatively equitable distribution of available income, resources, and opportunities for men and women in these countries. The tremendous gender gaps are identified primarily in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia.
Here, we can discuss the overall global gender gap scores across the index’s four main components : Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment.
The indicators of the four main components are
(1) Economic Participation and Opportunity:
o Labour force participation rate,
o wage equality for similar work,
o estimated earned income,
o Legislators, senior officials, and managers,
o Professional and technical workers.
(2) Educational Attainment:
o Literacy rate (%)
o Enrollment in primary education (%)
o Enrollment in secondary education (%)
o Enrollment in tertiary education (%).
(3) Health and Survival:
o Sex ratio at birth (%)
o Healthy life expectancy (years).
(4) Political Empowerment:
o Women in Parliament (%)
o Women in Ministerial positions (%)
o Years with a female head of State (last 50 years)
o The share of tenure years.
The objective is to shed light on which factors are driving the overall average decline in the global gender gap score. The analysis results show that this year’s decline is mainly caused by a reversal in performance on the Political Empowerment gap.
Global Trends and Outcomes:
– Globally, this year, i.e., 2021, the average distance completed to gender parity gap is 68% (This means that the remaining gender gap to close stands at 32%) a step back compared to 2020 (-0.6 percentage points). These figures are mainly driven by a decline in the performance of large countries. On its current trajectory, it will now take 135.6 years to close the gender gap worldwide.
– The gender gap in Political Empowerment remains the largest of the four gaps tracked, with only 22% closed to date, having further widened since the 2020 edition of the report by 2.4 percentage points. Across the 156 countries covered by the index, women represent only 26.1% of some 35,500 Parliament seats and 22.6% of over 3,400 Ministers worldwide. In 81 countries, there has never been a woman head of State as of January 15, 2021. At the current rate of progress, the World Economic Forum estimates that it will take 145.5 years to attain gender parity in politics.
– The gender gap in Economic Participation and Opportunity remains the second-largest of the four key gaps tracked by the index. According to this year’s index results, 58% of this gap has been closed so far. The gap has seen marginal improvement since the 2020 edition of the report, and as a result, we estimate that it will take another 267.6 years to close.
– Gender gaps in Educational Attainment and Health and Survival are nearly closed. In Educational Attainment, 95% of this gender gap has been closed globally, with 37 countries already attaining gender parity. However, the ‘last mile’ of progress is proceeding slowly. The index estimates that it will take another 14.2 years to close this gap on its current trajectory completely.
In Health and Survival, 96% of this gender gap has been closed, registering a marginal decline since last year (not due to COVID-19), and the time to close this gap remains undefined. For both education and health, while progress is higher than economy and politics in the global data, there are important future implications of disruptions due to the pandemic and continued variations in quality across income, geography, race, and ethnicity.
India-Specific Findings:
India had slipped 28 spots to rank 140 out of the 156 countries covered. The pandemic causing a disproportionate impact on women jeopardizes rolling back the little progress made in the last decades-forcing more women to drop off the workforce and leaving them vulnerable to domestic violence.
India’s poor performance on the Global Gender Gap report card hints at a serious wake-up call and learning lessons from the Nordic region for the Government and policy makers.
Within the 156 countries covered, women hold only 26 percent of Parliamentary seats and 22 percent of Ministerial positions. India, in some ways, reflects this widening gap, where the number of Ministers declined from 23.1 percent in 2019 to 9.1 percent in 2021. The number of women in Parliament stands low at 14.4 percent. In India, the gender gap has widened to 62.5 %, down from 66.8% the previous year.
It is mainly due to women’s inadequate representation in politics, technical and leadership roles, a decrease in women’s labor force participation rate, poor healthcare, lagging female to male literacy ratio, and income inequality.
The gap is the widest on the political empowerment dimension, with economic participation and opportunity being next in line. However, the gap on educational attainment and health and survival has been practically bridged.
India is the third-worst performer among South Asian countries, with Pakistan and Afghanistan trailing and Bangladesh being at the top. The report states that the country fared the worst in political empowerment, regressing from 23.9% to 9.1%.
Its ranking on the health and survival dimension is among the five worst performers. The economic participation and opportunity gap saw a decline of 3% compared to 2020, while India’s educational attainment front is in the 114th position.
India has deteriorated to 51st place from 18th place in 2020 on political empowerment. Still, it has slipped to 155th position from 150th position in 2020 on health and survival, 151st place in economic participation and opportunity from 149th place, and 114th place for educational attainment from 112th.
In 2020 reports, among the 153 countries studied, India is the only country where the economic gender gap of 64.6% is larger than the political gender gap of 58.9%. In 2021 report, among the 156 countries, the economic gender gap of India is 67.4%, 3.8% gender gap in education, 6.3% gap in health and survival, and 72.4% gender gap in political empowerment. In health and survival, the gender gap of the sex ratio at birth is above 9.1%, and healthy life expectancy is almost the same.
Discrimination against women has also been reflected in Health and Survival subindex statistics. With 93.7% of this gap closed to date, India ranks among the bottom five countries in this subindex. The wide sex ratio at birth gaps is due to the high incidence of gender-based sex-selective practices. Besides, more than one in four women has faced intimate violence in her lifetime.The gender gap in the literacy rate is above 20.1%.
Yet, gender gaps persist in literacy : one-third of women are illiterate (34.2%) than 17.6% of men. In political empowerment, globally, women in Parliament is at 128th position and gender gap of 83.2%, and 90% gap in a Ministerial position. The gap in wages equality for similar work is above 51.8%. On health and survival, four large countries Pakistan, India, Vietnam, and China, fare poorly, with millions of women there not getting the same access to health as men.
The pandemic has only slowed down in its tracks the progress India was making towards achieving gender parity. The country urgently needs to focus on “health and survival,” which points towards a skewed sex ratio because of the high incidence of gender-based sex-selective practices and women’s economic participation. Women’s labour force participation rate and the share of women in technical roles declined in 2020, reducing the estimated earned income of women, one-fifth of men.
Learning from the Nordic region, noteworthy participation of women in politics, institutions, and public life is the catalyst for transformational change. Women need to be equal participants in the labour force to pioneer the societal changes the world needs in this integral period of transition.
Every effort must be directed towards achieving gender parallelism by facilitating women in leadership and decision-making positions. Social protection programmes should be gender-responsive and account for the differential needs of women and girls. Research and scientific literature also provide unequivocal evidence that countries led by women are dealing with the pandemic more effectively than many others.
Gendered inequality, thereby, is a global concern. India should focus on targeted policies and earmarked public and private investments in care and equalized access. Women are not ready to wait for another century for equality. It’s time India accelerates its efforts and fight for an inclusive, equal, global recovery.
India will not fully develop unless both women and men are equally supported to reach their full potential. There are risks, violations, and vulnerabilities women face just because they are women. Most of these risks are directly linked to women’s economic, political, social, and cultural disadvantages in their daily lives. It becomes acute during crises and disasters.
With the prevalence of gender discrimination, and social norms and practices, women become exposed to the possibility of child marriage, teenage pregnancy, child domestic work, poor education and health, sexual abuse, exploitation, and violence. Many of these manifestations will not change unless women are valued more.
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]2021 WEF Global Gender Gap report, which confirmed its 2016 finding of a decline in worldwide progress towards gender parity.
Over 2.8 billion women are legally restricted from having the same choice of jobs as men. As many as 104 countries still have laws preventing women from working in specific jobs, 59 countries have no laws on sexual harassment in the workplace, and it is astonishing that a handful of countries still allow husbands to legally stop their wives from working.
Globally, women’s participation in the labour force is estimated at 63% (as against 94% of men who participate), but India’s is at a dismal 25% or so currently. Most women are in informal and vulnerable employment—domestic help, agriculture, etc—and are always paid less than men.
Recent reports from Assam suggest that women workers in plantations are paid much less than men and never promoted to supervisory roles. The gender wage gap is about 24% globally, and women have lost far more jobs than men during lockdowns.
The problem of gender disparity is compounded by hurdles put up by governments, society and businesses: unequal access to social security schemes, banking services, education, digital services and so on, even as a glass ceiling has kept leadership roles out of women’s reach.
Yes, many governments and businesses had been working on parity before the pandemic struck. But the global gender gap, defined by differences reflected in the social, political, intellectual, cultural and economic attainments or attitudes of men and women, will not narrow in the near future without all major stakeholders working together on a clear agenda—that of economic growth by inclusion.
The WEF report estimates 135 years to close the gap at our current rate of progress based on four pillars: educational attainment, health, economic participation and political empowerment.
India has slipped from rank 112 to 140 in a single year, confirming how hard women were hit by the pandemic. Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two Asian countries that fared worse.
Here are a few things we must do:
One, frame policies for equal-opportunity employment. Use technology and artificial intelligence to eliminate biases of gender, caste, etc, and select candidates at all levels on merit. Numerous surveys indicate that women in general have a better chance of landing jobs if their gender is not known to recruiters.
Two, foster a culture of gender sensitivity. Take a review of current policies and move from gender-neutral to gender-sensitive. Encourage and insist on diversity and inclusion at all levels, and promote more women internally to leadership roles. Demolish silos to let women grab potential opportunities in hitherto male-dominant roles. Work-from-home has taught us how efficiently women can manage flex-timings and productivity.
Three, deploy corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds for the education and skilling of women and girls at the bottom of the pyramid. CSR allocations to toilet building, the PM-Cares fund and firms’ own trusts could be re-channelled for this.
Four, get more women into research and development (R&D) roles. A study of over 4,000 companies found that more women in R&D jobs resulted in radical innovation. It appears women score far higher than men in championing change. If you seek growth from affordable products and services for low-income groups, women often have the best ideas.
Five, break barriers to allow progress. Cultural and structural issues must be fixed. Unconscious biases and discrimination are rampant even in highly-esteemed organizations. Establish fair and transparent human resource policies.
Six, get involved in local communities to engage them. As Michael Porter said, it is not possible for businesses to sustain long-term shareholder value without ensuring the welfare of the communities they exist in. It is in the best interest of enterprises to engage with local communities to understand and work towards lowering cultural and other barriers in society. It will also help connect with potential customers, employees and special interest groups driving the gender-equity agenda and achieve better diversity.