The question of privacy arises most notably with the Aristotelian distinction between the public sphere of governance and its separation from the private sphere of individuals concerning domestic life and family. Other than in philosophical discussions, the concept has a wide range of interpretation in many cultures.
Some interpretations might seem quite obscure and deal with moral relativism, as in how personal possessions might form different sorts of consensus depending on the degree and nature of social interaction in different societies. Although the advent of modernity has led to the proliferation of a norm-based approach to society based on the hierarchical set-up, which tends to universalize a society before traditionalizing it, privacy still remains an issue with obscure definitions.
It is only in the formal space that privacy is somewhat clearly defined, as in the case of information in a public forum that may or may not be private. In the informal space is still difficult to define the concept and much is dependent on interpretations and value judgments, such that no universal law can substantively be applied to all cases.
The law in India does not provide for a clearly demarcated right to privacy, and includes it as a limited right under the various rights provided in the Constitution. The right exists, but is burdened with numerous reasonable restrictions that prioritize national interest, foreign policy, national security, law and order, public morality, contempt of court, defamation and incitement to offences as under Article 19(2) of the Constitution.
As per the law, the state reserves the right to withhold the right to privacy if there is an issue of national interest superior to it. The right is also based on consent, such that the right is provided to those who voluntarily demand it, unless there are compelling state interests. The court however, recognizes the right against the government in certain cases, especially if other fundamental rights have been undermined in cases with no compelling state interest.
Privacy thus is defined in the law in India in purely formal terms, and personal privacy can frequently come under the lens of the state’s interests and in the interests of other legal obligations and rights. What the law is unable to clearly define is the right to personal privacy.
Personal privacy, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz would argue, cannot even be based on cultural norms. In his work ‘The Interpretation of Cultures’ (1973), Geertz argues that culture does not determine human behaviour but rather is the context that provides a thick description. Geertz held that the study of culture is not one of an experimental science concerning laws but of an interpretive science in search of understanding. There can thus be patterns of behaviour but not behaviour itself, in that there cannot be objective wholes in human behaviour but rather subjective inferences that require documentation.
Schoeman in 1984 took up the question of the cultural relativism and formed two methods of interpreting this. In the first method, the question is asked as to whether the issue concerning privacy is universal or is it subject to cultural differences. The other method questions whether some aspects of human life are inherently private and others not so just conventionally (J. De Cew, 2013).
While society and culture can be a reference for prescribed modes of behaviour, the requirements of privacy imply autonomy in behaviour. Individual privacy thus mutates against any prescribed form of conduct such that an individual defines the self by oneself. The question thus is one of individual autonomy and its interface with society. The concept can be defined thus at multiple levels, one of the larger society, another of culture, and another at an individual level. Ideally, at no point can one level be prioritized over another.
Historical Antecedents
After early summations in Aristotle’s notion of a separation between the public sphere and the private sphere, as a concept has proved notoriously elusive. Although historically the discussion is not uniform, treatises on the concept began to surface after privacy was defined under the law in America on moral grounds since the 1890s.
While some inferences looked at privacy morally, others treated it as a legal issue. Some arguments have even attempted to deny privacy while others have talked about the distinctions offered in motions around privacy.
In the second half of the 20th Century, philosophical discussions greatly proliferated as privacy laws were becoming more refined. Privacy in this period increasingly became defined in terms of information as the control over information of an individual or entity over the self.
When privacy was not defined in terms of information, it would usually be discussed with a concern towards human dignity and human rights. Privacy was also increasingly seen in terms of control over the access that others might have over an individual.
However, despite the need to respect individual autonomy, privacy also began to be seen in terms of its negative side. In this people with control over access to privacy could under the cloak of privacy protection, indulge in undesirable and illegal activities without any accountability.
This aspect has been a dominant feature among journalists, human rights activists, feminist thought, and alike that tries to lift the facade and install accountability among those with control over privacy. The dominant mode of discussion in contemporary times has been one of the influx of technology and the resulting expansion of the domicile under which privacy can be interpreted.
Technology and Privacy
Marshall Mc Luhan, the media theorist, referred to media technology as a prosthetic extending out from the human body (Mc Luhan, 1964). As technology continuously expands the minimum scope for human interaction, as its prosthetic of interaction, the more are the lines going to get blurred between the public and the private.
The prosthetic shapes an individual’s interaction with the objective reality of the habitat he inhabits, and is one that is the logical realization of the environment he inhabits. Media technology exists in terms of a mirror to the individual and is an extension of the self in a public substance. Technology thus mediates an individual’s psychological profile as the prosthetic of interaction by re-enacting the individual’s interaction in the media technology’s own formal configurations.
Later in the 20th Century, the Fourth Amendment in the US legally undertook to protect individuals from electronic surveillance and wiretaps. The massive amounts of information available in digital format makes many individuals suspicious of the role of technology in invading personal privacy.
Previously clandestine operations such as Carnivore by the FBI and Echelon as a global satellite network that preyed on digital interactions have been uncovered that add to the suspicion among individuals over the technological assimilation of privacy. Technology here takes control over access to privacy away from the autonomous individual and places it at the hands of specialists.
Technology thus acts to re-enact individual interaction and re-configures it according to its own forms on the basis of control over access. The continuous progress and innovation in technology makes it extremely difficult for legal definitions to be assigned to the evolving interactions.
Seemingly benevolent technological apparatus such as tracking technology in use by medical researchers can be a tool for more malevolent intent. The greatest problem with this situation is the inability of legal apparatus to be updated with new developments. Given how the concept is based on individual autonomy, should not the legal apparatus at least protect privacy in this definition?
Without this definition, and the accompanying corpus of rights, the concept shall continue to be an issue ill defined in modernity. Thinking must move ahead from defining privacy only in terms of its interaction with laws and the society at large to define it also in terms of culture and individual autonomy.
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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.
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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.