India: a country of contrasts

India is a city of contrasts. The beauty of its temples and the exciting delicacy of the flavors of its food contrast starkly with the levels of pollution and poverty in the country. For an outsider, the invisibility of women casts a mysterious shadow that is hard to ignore. You can feel it on the streets, while navigating in a sea of males. You can feel it in the meeting rooms, where male presence tends to be overwhelming. As you will read in posts that follow, I'm working with organizations that try to empower women. Even so, I haven't attended one single meeting where the ratio of males to females is more than 1:6 (counting myself).

Source: A street of Old Delhi

Challenge: finding a single woman in the street

Not shockingly, it is also visible it on the statistics. Close to half (48%) of India's population is composed of women (Census 2011). However, in 2014 female labor force participation (LFP) was only 27%, which contrasts with 50% worldwide and 32% in South Asia (ILO). These low rates respond to cultural and social norms. Nonetheless, on a more preoccupying note, it is also reflected in the levels of gender violence. According to the Huffington Post, "Last year, over three lakh [thousand] women were kidnapped, raped, molested --and in some extreme cases, killed- by men across the country". This number has been increasingly steadily since 2009. Intimate partner violence is disquieting: according to a study published by the International Center for Research on Women and UNFPA in 2014, 52% of the women respondents reported that they had experienced violence during their lifetime and 60% of the males said they had acted violently against their wife/partner during their life (for more on this topic, see http://daughtersofmotherindia.com/).