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Indian Women Seeking Jobs Confront Taboos and Threats

110 points by pavornyoh 11y ago

harigov 11y ago
I am not sure what's going on at NY Times. They seem to write a lot of articles focusing on negative things about India. In a country as large as India, you can always find something exceptional. This article about Indian women is as much a news to me as it is to anyone else. From the place where I come from, I don't know of any woman who doesn't work because of some family/societal pressure. That doesn't mean that there are no other issues, but a balanced narrative would have been nice. Examples: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/28/opinion/the-right-wing-attack-on-indias-universities.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/28/opinion/the-right-wing-att... http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/28/opinion/suicide-on-an-indian-campus.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/28/opinion/suicide-on-an-indi... http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/insider/we-will-not-apologize-encountering-the-defiant-women-of-india.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/insider/we-will-not-apolog... http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/15/opinion/indias-move-against-the-poor.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/15/opinion/indias-move-agains...
- pmarreck 11y ago
  It's not just nytimes lol https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/01/14/more-people-die-taking-selfies-in-india-than-anywhere-else-in-the-world/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/01/14... ...just saw that one yesterday To be sure, I love India (from afar), but they have a looooooooooooot of work left to do to become anything close to a first-world nation. Fixing infrastructure and cultural issues (neither of which will be easy) would be a massive first step. Also, India is so large that trying to claim that "India is like this" or "India is like that" seems futile, as evidenced by your (admittedly anecdotal) example.
  - indians_pro 11y ago
    >but they have a looooooooooooot of work left to do to become anything close to a first-world nation. ur bias is leaking. being a 'first world' nation (a very arbitrary classification in the first place) is not a necessarily desirable attribute for a country to have. u can keep ur defacto oligarchy, ur mind numbing culture and media, which brainwashes citizens to conform and support foreign wars at enormous expense to human life and effort (through wasted tax money), let us keep our poverty, culture, and sane values... normally i wouldnt be so forthright and defensive, but the arrogant blindness of the comment really struck me as needing a counter, however unsupported by sources it may be (at this point, the futility and greed behind these wars and the global interference of wester nations, one in particular, is common knowledge).
    - TraderDuck 11y ago
      > which brainwashes citizens to conform and support foreign wars at enormous expense to human life and effort Lol. Not that I disagree about the americans spending too much on defense, but how can you say this with a straight face while India continually engages in a military dick-swinging contest with Pakistan? How are things in Kashmir these days?
      - indians_pro 11y ago
        haha. ha ha ha. a lot of pakistans intelligence services are financed by the cia (seriously, search it) and it is well-documented that the 'militants' coming over the border r paki agents. the dick swinging is over ownership of Kashmir, and no surprises, US-published maps of India do not include Kashmir as part of it. and india is never the aggressor in borded encounters, this is verifiably true. please i sincerely request u to watch this - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qVHzAinRH4g https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qVHzAinRH4g - to see the sort of propoganda us regularly engages in to dupe the global discourse. it is a very intense 1 hr watch and i daresay ull enjoy it more than many movies. noone has anything against americans themselves. just that their money is going to finance a govt that is increasingly mort aggressive at establishing global domminance, and that too using underhand tactics. please watch it and tell me ur opinion of it. my american friends liked it a lot.
  - dudul 11y ago
    "India is so large that trying to claim that "India is like this" or "India is like that" seems futile" Out of curiosity, which country is small enough to be able to say "Foo is like this" "Foo is like that"? Brazil? Italy? Switzerland? What's the right size to be able to qualify a country with one sentence?
    - arjie 11y ago
      Solid point. It's homogeneity vs. heterogeneity that matters, rather than the size. And being heterogeneous in one respect doesn't guarantee heterogeneity in others. For instance, America is a large country, and has people who live all sorts of lives. And yet when asked whether women have the same rights as men, the responses are incredibly homogeneous. On the other hand, opinions about whether abortion is morally acceptable are significantly different between urban (and suburban) populations and rural populations. America is large. And you can very well claim that Americans believe men and women should be treated equally. No futility there. And India is no different. There are issues with opinions which have broad appeal there and issues on which opinion is divided. Nothing is served by pretending that some group of individuals is so diverse that there is no issue on which they overwhelmingly favour one opinion. That's rarely (if ever) true.
    - nine_k 11y ago
      Vatican? San Marino? Andorra?
      - dudul 11y ago
        Are you completing my list or answering and saying that everybody in Vatican/San Marino/Andorra is the same, and that it is acceptable for example to say "everybody in Andorra is nice", or "everybody in San Marino likes gold"?
    - pavanky 11y ago
      There are plenty of small countries with populations smaller than medium sized cities. But that's besides the point. People here don't use the same brush to paint the entirety of US (or Europe), but they openly do so for many larger developing countries.
  - whelp 11y ago
    I love India too (from afar far far away...), but I got to correct this for you: > ... but they have a looooooooooooot of work left to do to become anything close to a <strike>first</strike> second-world nation.
    - wavefunction 11y ago
      India is a developing economy and a society that is rapidly modernizing, bringing many folks into a brighter future as quickly as they can from my perspective. I'm a white American who has visited different parts of India three times over the past four years and each time I find the amount of progress and change remarkable. This doesn't mean that there aren't many issues and major tasks to tackle but I find the resilience and pluck of the whole spectrum of Indians I've met to be commendable and invigorating.
- herbig 11y ago
  What part of India are you from? Rural or urban? The article seems to be focused on women in rural communities. Also, I don't think India is unique in negative coverage. With a newspaper as big as the NYT you're bound to find something negative, but every country gets primarily negative coverage, including the U.S. That's the news that sells.
  - harigov 11y ago
    Urban, but I am also not well informed on social issues. I don't deny the existence of whatever issue that the article mentioned but I just find it interesting that they don't showcase any progress India makes in these regards.
    - addicted 11y ago
      Because India has made very little progress in rural areas. We've largely regressed. Just look at the farmer suicide situation. This is my biggest frustration with the urban Indian middle class (which forms a very small slice of the population). We are almost completely unaware of how the rest of the country has been suffering over the last many years. A very visible example of this was the BJP India Shining campaign, which led to a massive electoral defeat. The BJP thought India was doing awesome because their entire worldview was centered around the Delhi middle class, while the rest of the country looked upon buses driving by with India Shining posters as a cruel joke. And the BJP faced the consequences in that election.
      - harigov 11y ago
        Maybe you are right. However, please remember that economy is as much dependent on public outlook as it is on other fundamentals like infrastructure, literacy, health, etc., If people think that the country is going somewhere, they will be excited to take risk and move forward in their life. So I don't see anything wrong with India Shining. With respect to rural India, I honestly don't know enough to comment.
- addicted 11y ago
  Actually, the real question should be what's going on in India. Your personal anecdote about not knowing women who don't work due to family pressures is ridiculously easily contradicted by the actual statistics. But here's a personal anecdote as well. My father's company had a female worker quit after she was promoted to basically being 2nd in charge from a fairly low position in HR (she's really brilliant) because her family insisted she had to have a child, and once she did they insisted she quit the job (she was offered 6 months maternity leave, as well as the ability to work from home. Her family was against it). He's also seen 2 other women have to quit their jobs because of family pressures in the past 2 years. So he's seen more women quit work in the past 2 years because of family pressures than the entire 2 decades he was running the company prior to these 2 years. And this is in Mumbai, not a distant rural village. Everytime someone writes/says something negative about India the first (and often, the only) response is to whine about the messenger instead of actually doing something about the issue at hand. After we do nothing to actually fix the issues, we wonder why people keep writing about all the issues India has.
  - deleted 11y ago
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  - rustynails 11y ago
    I had a look through New York Times on India (note: I have no connections with India, it was in response to a poster's comment about prejudice toward India and its subsequent brash dismissal that caught my attention). Many of the articles on India are negative. However, bad news sells. So, I wouldn't have expected anything different. There were some general non-negative articles (Whales dying on shores, LGBT laws gaining momentum). There was an absence of positive articles about India from a quick search. By contrast, I looked at Australia in the New York Times. Most of the articles were on sport and bushfires, so, there's definitely a different focus and attitude. Australia seems to be social events, India social unrest and injustices. I consider the New York Times to be prejudiced at times though. However, the article in question was well written, despite a lack of explanation of why there are less women in the Indian workforce than there were in the past. One example of NYT prejudice I remember was about Australia's first female PM, Julia Gillard. The NYT described Australians (collectively) as misogynistic because we dared to criticise a female Prime Minister about her looks. I searched at the time and found ONE media reference to a criticism from Germaine Greer - a prominent feminist - about Gillard's fat ass (I saw 'ditch the witch' after this article). I contrasted this to other PMs: John Howard in a bondage pose with his nose up George Bush's ass among many personal attacks on him (conveniently ignored), tony Abbott in his budgie smugglers and exaggerated lips, etc. The NYT must have had very big blinkers (or my prejudice comment holds). The reality is that India does bad things AND the media is very prejudiced. I think the dismissal of prejudice in the media is dangerous. Maybe, a letter to NYT suggesting some positive things in India may help raise awareness.
- rajathagasthya 11y ago
  Not to mention the racist cartoon which New York Times published in 2014 after the success of India's Mars mission and it's subsequent apology. There is clearly history of focusing on negative things about India, but bad news sells. The 'New York Times' Publishes Racist Comic About India's Space Mission: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharanya-haridas/the-new-york-times-publis_b_5903118.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharanya-haridas/the-new-york-... New York Times Apologizes For Racist Cartoon On India's Space Program: http://io9.gizmodo.com/new-york-times-apologizes-for-racist-cartoon-on-indias-1643314583 http://io9.gizmodo.com/new-york-times-apologizes-for-racist-...
shortsightedsid 11y ago
The problem with India is that no stereotype really exists. For every truth, the opposite is also true. I wonder why the NY Times, the BBC etc.. focus so much on the negative. Does the idea of India go synonymously with poverty for them? Yes. India has enormous challenges. But the fact remains that hundreds of millions of people have come out of poverty in just 25 years. It's time the narrative changes.
- DanBC 11y ago
  The BBC, especially BBC TV, have extensive positive coverage of India. There are hours and hours of documentary and factual programmes from India.
- typon 11y ago
  It's true of any country. Positive news doesn't get too many people's attention. If you listened to Democracy Now! every single day, you'd think the USA was a fascist state. This is not to disparage either Democracy Now! or say that the US doesn't have problems. The point is to look at a broad variety of sources and try to eliminate selection bias from your own news consumption.
  - wavefunction 11y ago
    Democracy Now! has a mission of focusing on issues that should be fixed. There are plenty of outlets to get feel-good journalism and I must say that I get a powerful sense that many people are working hard to fix the issues that face the United States, rather than just an enumeration of its faults and deficiencies. It's nice to listen to educated and knowledgeable people make forceful arguments about problems and solutions, and it lends a sense of forward progress, even if that progress is minimized or difficult in the face of the status quo.
- Evenjos 11y ago
  I assume this article is reporting the truth about the culture and hardships these women face. If it's true, then it's not a stereotype or a false narrative. It's an honest look at what's going on in that region of India.
openforce 11y ago
Title stereotypes Indian women. Title should have been more specific like the story and mentioned Geeta or her village.
- nacs 11y ago
  It's just a title.. and most titles on HN are taken verbatim from the source's title. Its rare for it to be edited and I see no reason here for it to be changed.
es09 11y ago
The statistic that stood out for me was the drop in the fraction of labor that are women. This is also true for China in the last couple of decades, admittedly from a much higher level. Anecdotally, I hear from business people in India that hiring is very tough at all levels and there are simply not enough qualified people available. How does that square with declining participation of women? Perhaps the increased wealth is making all of the labor in the lower rung drop out of bad jobs? Is this statistic reliable to begin with? This wasn't really a focus of this article but I wish it was.
- rdudekul 11y ago
  That statistic may not be accurate, as more and more women have been entering workforce for the past 2 decades in India. However most such jobs, such as working as a maid or cook at some one else's house, may not be documented and hence probably doesn't figure into the statistic.
- verroq 11y ago
  Is it supposed to be the percentage of women in the workforce or the percentage of the workforce that are women?
  - es09 11y ago
    Good point. It's the fraction of women that are in the labor force - http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS
visualsearchsv 11y ago
I wish that NYTimes would differentiate between Individual indian States. Individual states have significant autonomy and depending upon the government elected can range from moderate to leftist. Largest indian states have populations similar to large nations such as Mexico ~ Maharashtra. And have huge variation in metrics like literacy rates ranging from 93% (Kerala ~ Canada ) to 63% (Bihar ~ Philippines). ~ is used to show country with similar population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_states_ranking_by_literacy_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_states_ranking_by_liter... http://www.economist.com/content/indian-summary http://www.economist.com/content/indian-summary
- whelp 11y ago
  What does it mean to be literate in India? http://gbytes.gsood.com/2006/07/03/literacy-in-india-can-india-spell-success/ http://gbytes.gsood.com/2006/07/03/literacy-in-india-can-ind...
  - pavanky 11y ago
    This "survey" was held in villages in 5 of the most backward states in India. In Hindi. 13 years ago. Two of the states also do not speak Hindi as their primary language. Do you really think this is a fair representation of India as a whole ?
  - sanjeetsuhag 11y ago
    That's from 2006.
- hackuser 11y ago
  > the government elected can range from moderate to leftist Isn't the BJP, the Hindu nationalist party that now runs the country, right-wing? I know they are openly anti-Muslim in some times and places.
  - chimeracoder 11y ago
    > I know they are openly anti-Muslim in some times and places. What makes 'anti-Muslim' inherently right-wing? Certainly in the US and Western Europe, there's no shortage of Islamophobia to go around in the left-wing parties.
Cherian_Abraham 11y ago
I am an Indian. I don't care about the portrayal of India in a story such as this - I care that these things still happen. I am also tremendously proud that I am born in the same country as these badass women.
- deleted 11y ago
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la6470 11y ago
My project manager who is from India liberally uses the four letter word at work ... At every project meeting she says fk this fk that .. I don't know if she is just showing off , is this feminism or what? But my HR training says I should complain to HR because I feel annoyed and offended. I get really pissed hearing it again and again but no one else seems to mind so I am not sure what to do. I am 40 year old Indian male working in NY.
- pavanky 11y ago
  Are you saying it's just your project manager who says swears during meetings ?
  - la6470 11y ago
    Yes she is the only one who swears.
- _cudgel 11y ago
  My advice here is straightforward: fuggedaboutit. Adults curse; sometimes too much. It makes them look stupid, too. But there's no need to be both annoyed and offended. Be annoyed, sure, but then perhaps consider that you're simply a better person. Consider, too, that going to HR over something like this _will_ make you enemies. Finally, consider just how much care and feeding that moral high-horse costs you, in emotional and mental energy. Just let it go!
  - clockworkelf 11y ago
    And if it were reversed where a female subordinate complains about a cursing Indian male project manager? Uh oh Patriarchy!
- DrScump 11y ago
  is she from a different caste?
  - statictype 11y ago
tn13 11y ago
Usual NYT hitjob painting Indian pagan/heathens as horrible people. Somehow NYT links this to BJP which is barely in power for last 2 years.
- cholantesh 11y ago
  Usual Sanghi response of denial, deflection, and ad hom. The BJP isn't even mentioned; In fact, the most senior governmental figure mentioned is a former village chief and a Muslim.
pavornyoh 11y ago
This story is heartbreaking. Who is looking out for these downtrodden women? Who is looking out for their rights? It is admirable how these women continue to fight and have hope despite their problems.
pj_mukh 11y ago
This article is written to be a fantastic Bollywood movie. One that could potentially have a huge impact. Indian pop culture wields tremendous power, how about they use it more often?! Hollywood does this on a daily basis.
deleted 11y ago
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finiteautomata 11y ago
Man where do these leftist feminazis get the balls to write such fabricated shit, fucking make the Muslim politician the good guy and the Hindu men the bad guys. Oh, look at those stupid Hindu superstitions, woman are treated so bad in Inidia. Fuck these people, sure discrimination does occur, I bet it happens even the USA or any other country albeit more subtly. But it is nowhere as bad as these low life fucks have fabricated it to be. In this day and age no man in India would stop his wife from earning money to supplement the family income. Would he get drunk with the money and gamble it away ? Sure that is pretty common, and the Muslim women have it the hardest, which is an open secret, heck there is no uniform civil code in India, Muslim men can be polygamous, first write about that you cunts at New York Times.
flux988 11y ago
This article is intellectually dishonest. It tries to subtly weave this narrative as causal to the declining participation of women in the workforce. This is data fudging of massive proportions. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the participation of women is decreasing because of worsening social conditions for women. The social conditions for women have definitely become better over the last decades. The declining percentage of women in the workforce could be a result of a hundred other factors even if we assume that data is correct which I would be rather skeptical of.
- anovikov 11y ago
  Maybe it's just that the life has been so terrible in India a while ago that women were just forced to work regardless of the cultural norms, and now when it got better, these norms kicked in?
  - flux988 11y ago
    Life is still terrible for a lot of people - it is terrible for all poor people - it is terrible for all poor men and women - and it is terrible for all kinds of poor people. But that still doesn't take away the fact that India is changing dramatically for the better for everyone including men and women and lower castes and what not, and the pace of change is accelerating. But no matter how much it changes, some of these stories will be there even decades from now. The only reason reporting such a story makes sense is when it is indicative of a larger trend and when the writer chose to link it to the dubious statistic, she gave her intent away. What the author needs to do is to dig deeper into the statistic, how is that collected, what is the segmentation and then align that research with broader economic and social trends to get a true picture. Only after all of this is done that she can take pick an anecdotal case and use that to better articulate her findings. That research which changes everything wasn't done.
dankohn1 11y ago
Please realize that this article is not fundamentally about India, nor just about the plight of rural women there. It is about injustice, and the aspiration to improve yourself, and the obstacles that prevent that. The kind of taboos that were enforced against these women can be found in all traditional cultures, from the rural South in the US today to many Catholic developing world countries. All of us should be grateful that we were not raised in an environment where we were told not to do untraditional things, with the warning backed up by the threat of violence.
known 11y ago
A nation of 1.3 billion psychopaths https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15/a-fascinating-map-of-the-worlds-most-and-least-racially-tolerant-countries/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15...

110 points by pavornyoh 11y ago

I am not sure what's going on at NY Times. They seem to write a lot of articles focusing on negative things about India. In a country as large as India, you can always find something exceptional. This article about Indian women is as much a news to me as it is to anyone else. From the place where I come from, I don't know of any woman who doesn't work because of some family/societal pressure. That doesn't mean that there are no other issues, but a balanced narrative would have been nice. Examples: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/28/opinion/the-right-wing-attack-on-indias-universities.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/28/opinion/the-right-wing-att... http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/28/opinion/suicide-on-an-indian-campus.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/28/opinion/suicide-on-an-indi... http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/insider/we-will-not-apologize-encountering-the-defiant-women-of-india.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/insider/we-will-not-apolog... http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/15/opinion/indias-move-against-the-poor.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/15/opinion/indias-move-agains...

pmarreck 11y ago
It's not just nytimes lol https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/01/14/more-people-die-taking-selfies-in-india-than-anywhere-else-in-the-world/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/01/14... ...just saw that one yesterday To be sure, I love India (from afar), but they have a looooooooooooot of work left to do to become anything close to a first-world nation. Fixing infrastructure and cultural issues (neither of which will be easy) would be a massive first step. Also, India is so large that trying to claim that "India is like this" or "India is like that" seems futile, as evidenced by your (admittedly anecdotal) example.
- indians_pro 11y ago
  >but they have a looooooooooooot of work left to do to become anything close to a first-world nation. ur bias is leaking. being a 'first world' nation (a very arbitrary classification in the first place) is not a necessarily desirable attribute for a country to have. u can keep ur defacto oligarchy, ur mind numbing culture and media, which brainwashes citizens to conform and support foreign wars at enormous expense to human life and effort (through wasted tax money), let us keep our poverty, culture, and sane values... normally i wouldnt be so forthright and defensive, but the arrogant blindness of the comment really struck me as needing a counter, however unsupported by sources it may be (at this point, the futility and greed behind these wars and the global interference of wester nations, one in particular, is common knowledge).
  - TraderDuck 11y ago
    > which brainwashes citizens to conform and support foreign wars at enormous expense to human life and effort Lol. Not that I disagree about the americans spending too much on defense, but how can you say this with a straight face while India continually engages in a military dick-swinging contest with Pakistan? How are things in Kashmir these days?
    - indians_pro 11y ago
      haha. ha ha ha. a lot of pakistans intelligence services are financed by the cia (seriously, search it) and it is well-documented that the 'militants' coming over the border r paki agents. the dick swinging is over ownership of Kashmir, and no surprises, US-published maps of India do not include Kashmir as part of it. and india is never the aggressor in borded encounters, this is verifiably true. please i sincerely request u to watch this - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qVHzAinRH4g https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qVHzAinRH4g - to see the sort of propoganda us regularly engages in to dupe the global discourse. it is a very intense 1 hr watch and i daresay ull enjoy it more than many movies. noone has anything against americans themselves. just that their money is going to finance a govt that is increasingly mort aggressive at establishing global domminance, and that too using underhand tactics. please watch it and tell me ur opinion of it. my american friends liked it a lot.
- dudul 11y ago
  "India is so large that trying to claim that "India is like this" or "India is like that" seems futile" Out of curiosity, which country is small enough to be able to say "Foo is like this" "Foo is like that"? Brazil? Italy? Switzerland? What's the right size to be able to qualify a country with one sentence?
  - arjie 11y ago
    Solid point. It's homogeneity vs. heterogeneity that matters, rather than the size. And being heterogeneous in one respect doesn't guarantee heterogeneity in others. For instance, America is a large country, and has people who live all sorts of lives. And yet when asked whether women have the same rights as men, the responses are incredibly homogeneous. On the other hand, opinions about whether abortion is morally acceptable are significantly different between urban (and suburban) populations and rural populations. America is large. And you can very well claim that Americans believe men and women should be treated equally. No futility there. And India is no different. There are issues with opinions which have broad appeal there and issues on which opinion is divided. Nothing is served by pretending that some group of individuals is so diverse that there is no issue on which they overwhelmingly favour one opinion. That's rarely (if ever) true.
  - nine_k 11y ago
    Vatican? San Marino? Andorra?
    - dudul 11y ago
      Are you completing my list or answering and saying that everybody in Vatican/San Marino/Andorra is the same, and that it is acceptable for example to say "everybody in Andorra is nice", or "everybody in San Marino likes gold"?
  - pavanky 11y ago
    There are plenty of small countries with populations smaller than medium sized cities. But that's besides the point. People here don't use the same brush to paint the entirety of US (or Europe), but they openly do so for many larger developing countries.
- whelp 11y ago
  I love India too (from afar far far away...), but I got to correct this for you: > ... but they have a looooooooooooot of work left to do to become anything close to a <strike>first</strike> second-world nation.
  - wavefunction 11y ago
    India is a developing economy and a society that is rapidly modernizing, bringing many folks into a brighter future as quickly as they can from my perspective. I'm a white American who has visited different parts of India three times over the past four years and each time I find the amount of progress and change remarkable. This doesn't mean that there aren't many issues and major tasks to tackle but I find the resilience and pluck of the whole spectrum of Indians I've met to be commendable and invigorating.
herbig 11y ago
What part of India are you from? Rural or urban? The article seems to be focused on women in rural communities. Also, I don't think India is unique in negative coverage. With a newspaper as big as the NYT you're bound to find something negative, but every country gets primarily negative coverage, including the U.S. That's the news that sells.
- harigov 11y ago
  Urban, but I am also not well informed on social issues. I don't deny the existence of whatever issue that the article mentioned but I just find it interesting that they don't showcase any progress India makes in these regards.
  - addicted 11y ago
    Because India has made very little progress in rural areas. We've largely regressed. Just look at the farmer suicide situation. This is my biggest frustration with the urban Indian middle class (which forms a very small slice of the population). We are almost completely unaware of how the rest of the country has been suffering over the last many years. A very visible example of this was the BJP India Shining campaign, which led to a massive electoral defeat. The BJP thought India was doing awesome because their entire worldview was centered around the Delhi middle class, while the rest of the country looked upon buses driving by with India Shining posters as a cruel joke. And the BJP faced the consequences in that election.
    - harigov 11y ago
      Maybe you are right. However, please remember that economy is as much dependent on public outlook as it is on other fundamentals like infrastructure, literacy, health, etc., If people think that the country is going somewhere, they will be excited to take risk and move forward in their life. So I don't see anything wrong with India Shining. With respect to rural India, I honestly don't know enough to comment.
addicted 11y ago
Actually, the real question should be what's going on in India. Your personal anecdote about not knowing women who don't work due to family pressures is ridiculously easily contradicted by the actual statistics. But here's a personal anecdote as well. My father's company had a female worker quit after she was promoted to basically being 2nd in charge from a fairly low position in HR (she's really brilliant) because her family insisted she had to have a child, and once she did they insisted she quit the job (she was offered 6 months maternity leave, as well as the ability to work from home. Her family was against it). He's also seen 2 other women have to quit their jobs because of family pressures in the past 2 years. So he's seen more women quit work in the past 2 years because of family pressures than the entire 2 decades he was running the company prior to these 2 years. And this is in Mumbai, not a distant rural village. Everytime someone writes/says something negative about India the first (and often, the only) response is to whine about the messenger instead of actually doing something about the issue at hand. After we do nothing to actually fix the issues, we wonder why people keep writing about all the issues India has.
- deleted 11y ago
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- rustynails 11y ago
  I had a look through New York Times on India (note: I have no connections with India, it was in response to a poster's comment about prejudice toward India and its subsequent brash dismissal that caught my attention). Many of the articles on India are negative. However, bad news sells. So, I wouldn't have expected anything different. There were some general non-negative articles (Whales dying on shores, LGBT laws gaining momentum). There was an absence of positive articles about India from a quick search. By contrast, I looked at Australia in the New York Times. Most of the articles were on sport and bushfires, so, there's definitely a different focus and attitude. Australia seems to be social events, India social unrest and injustices. I consider the New York Times to be prejudiced at times though. However, the article in question was well written, despite a lack of explanation of why there are less women in the Indian workforce than there were in the past. One example of NYT prejudice I remember was about Australia's first female PM, Julia Gillard. The NYT described Australians (collectively) as misogynistic because we dared to criticise a female Prime Minister about her looks. I searched at the time and found ONE media reference to a criticism from Germaine Greer - a prominent feminist - about Gillard's fat ass (I saw 'ditch the witch' after this article). I contrasted this to other PMs: John Howard in a bondage pose with his nose up George Bush's ass among many personal attacks on him (conveniently ignored), tony Abbott in his budgie smugglers and exaggerated lips, etc. The NYT must have had very big blinkers (or my prejudice comment holds). The reality is that India does bad things AND the media is very prejudiced. I think the dismissal of prejudice in the media is dangerous. Maybe, a letter to NYT suggesting some positive things in India may help raise awareness.
rajathagasthya 11y ago
Not to mention the racist cartoon which New York Times published in 2014 after the success of India's Mars mission and it's subsequent apology. There is clearly history of focusing on negative things about India, but bad news sells. The 'New York Times' Publishes Racist Comic About India's Space Mission: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharanya-haridas/the-new-york-times-publis_b_5903118.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharanya-haridas/the-new-york-... New York Times Apologizes For Racist Cartoon On India's Space Program: http://io9.gizmodo.com/new-york-times-apologizes-for-racist-cartoon-on-indias-1643314583 http://io9.gizmodo.com/new-york-times-apologizes-for-racist-...

shortsightedsid 11y ago

The problem with India is that no stereotype really exists. For every truth, the opposite is also true. I wonder why the NY Times, the BBC etc.. focus so much on the negative. Does the idea of India go synonymously with poverty for them? Yes. India has enormous challenges. But the fact remains that hundreds of millions of people have come out of poverty in just 25 years. It's time the narrative changes.

DanBC 11y ago
The BBC, especially BBC TV, have extensive positive coverage of India. There are hours and hours of documentary and factual programmes from India.
typon 11y ago
It's true of any country. Positive news doesn't get too many people's attention. If you listened to Democracy Now! every single day, you'd think the USA was a fascist state. This is not to disparage either Democracy Now! or say that the US doesn't have problems. The point is to look at a broad variety of sources and try to eliminate selection bias from your own news consumption.
- wavefunction 11y ago
  Democracy Now! has a mission of focusing on issues that should be fixed. There are plenty of outlets to get feel-good journalism and I must say that I get a powerful sense that many people are working hard to fix the issues that face the United States, rather than just an enumeration of its faults and deficiencies. It's nice to listen to educated and knowledgeable people make forceful arguments about problems and solutions, and it lends a sense of forward progress, even if that progress is minimized or difficult in the face of the status quo.
Evenjos 11y ago
I assume this article is reporting the truth about the culture and hardships these women face. If it's true, then it's not a stereotype or a false narrative. It's an honest look at what's going on in that region of India.

openforce 11y ago

Title stereotypes Indian women. Title should have been more specific like the story and mentioned Geeta or her village.

nacs 11y ago
It's just a title.. and most titles on HN are taken verbatim from the source's title. Its rare for it to be edited and I see no reason here for it to be changed.

es09 11y ago

The statistic that stood out for me was the drop in the fraction of labor that are women. This is also true for China in the last couple of decades, admittedly from a much higher level. Anecdotally, I hear from business people in India that hiring is very tough at all levels and there are simply not enough qualified people available. How does that square with declining participation of women? Perhaps the increased wealth is making all of the labor in the lower rung drop out of bad jobs? Is this statistic reliable to begin with? This wasn't really a focus of this article but I wish it was.

rdudekul 11y ago
That statistic may not be accurate, as more and more women have been entering workforce for the past 2 decades in India. However most such jobs, such as working as a maid or cook at some one else's house, may not be documented and hence probably doesn't figure into the statistic.
verroq 11y ago
Is it supposed to be the percentage of women in the workforce or the percentage of the workforce that are women?
- es09 11y ago
  Good point. It's the fraction of women that are in the labor force - http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS

visualsearchsv 11y ago

I wish that NYTimes would differentiate between Individual indian States. Individual states have significant autonomy and depending upon the government elected can range from moderate to leftist. Largest indian states have populations similar to large nations such as Mexico ~ Maharashtra. And have huge variation in metrics like literacy rates ranging from 93% (Kerala ~ Canada ) to 63% (Bihar ~ Philippines). ~ is used to show country with similar population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_states_ranking_by_literacy_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_states_ranking_by_liter... http://www.economist.com/content/indian-summary http://www.economist.com/content/indian-summary

whelp 11y ago
What does it mean to be literate in India? http://gbytes.gsood.com/2006/07/03/literacy-in-india-can-india-spell-success/ http://gbytes.gsood.com/2006/07/03/literacy-in-india-can-ind...
- pavanky 11y ago
  This "survey" was held in villages in 5 of the most backward states in India. In Hindi. 13 years ago. Two of the states also do not speak Hindi as their primary language. Do you really think this is a fair representation of India as a whole ?
- sanjeetsuhag 11y ago
  That's from 2006.
hackuser 11y ago
> the government elected can range from moderate to leftist Isn't the BJP, the Hindu nationalist party that now runs the country, right-wing? I know they are openly anti-Muslim in some times and places.
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  > I know they are openly anti-Muslim in some times and places. What makes 'anti-Muslim' inherently right-wing? Certainly in the US and Western Europe, there's no shortage of Islamophobia to go around in the left-wing parties.

Cherian_Abraham 11y ago

I am an Indian. I don't care about the portrayal of India in a story such as this - I care that these things still happen. I am also tremendously proud that I am born in the same country as these badass women.

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la6470 11y ago

My project manager who is from India liberally uses the four letter word at work ... At every project meeting she says fk this fk that .. I don't know if she is just showing off , is this feminism or what? But my HR training says I should complain to HR because I feel annoyed and offended. I get really pissed hearing it again and again but no one else seems to mind so I am not sure what to do. I am 40 year old Indian male working in NY.

pavanky 11y ago
Are you saying it's just your project manager who says swears during meetings ?
- la6470 11y ago
  Yes she is the only one who swears.
_cudgel 11y ago
My advice here is straightforward: fuggedaboutit. Adults curse; sometimes too much. It makes them look stupid, too. But there's no need to be both annoyed and offended. Be annoyed, sure, but then perhaps consider that you're simply a better person. Consider, too, that going to HR over something like this _will_ make you enemies. Finally, consider just how much care and feeding that moral high-horse costs you, in emotional and mental energy. Just let it go!
- clockworkelf 11y ago
  And if it were reversed where a female subordinate complains about a cursing Indian male project manager? Uh oh Patriarchy!
DrScump 11y ago
is she from a different caste?
- statictype 11y ago

tn13 11y ago

Usual NYT hitjob painting Indian pagan/heathens as horrible people. Somehow NYT links this to BJP which is barely in power for last 2 years.

cholantesh 11y ago
Usual Sanghi response of denial, deflection, and ad hom. The BJP isn't even mentioned; In fact, the most senior governmental figure mentioned is a former village chief and a Muslim.

pavornyoh 11y ago

This story is heartbreaking. Who is looking out for these downtrodden women? Who is looking out for their rights? It is admirable how these women continue to fight and have hope despite their problems.

pj_mukh 11y ago

This article is written to be a fantastic Bollywood movie. One that could potentially have a huge impact. Indian pop culture wields tremendous power, how about they use it more often?! Hollywood does this on a daily basis.

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finiteautomata 11y ago

Man where do these leftist feminazis get the balls to write such fabricated shit, fucking make the Muslim politician the good guy and the Hindu men the bad guys. Oh, look at those stupid Hindu superstitions, woman are treated so bad in Inidia. Fuck these people, sure discrimination does occur, I bet it happens even the USA or any other country albeit more subtly. But it is nowhere as bad as these low life fucks have fabricated it to be. In this day and age no man in India would stop his wife from earning money to supplement the family income. Would he get drunk with the money and gamble it away ? Sure that is pretty common, and the Muslim women have it the hardest, which is an open secret, heck there is no uniform civil code in India, Muslim men can be polygamous, first write about that you cunts at New York Times.

flux988 11y ago

This article is intellectually dishonest. It tries to subtly weave this narrative as causal to the declining participation of women in the workforce. This is data fudging of massive proportions. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the participation of women is decreasing because of worsening social conditions for women. The social conditions for women have definitely become better over the last decades. The declining percentage of women in the workforce could be a result of a hundred other factors even if we assume that data is correct which I would be rather skeptical of.

anovikov 11y ago
Maybe it's just that the life has been so terrible in India a while ago that women were just forced to work regardless of the cultural norms, and now when it got better, these norms kicked in?
- flux988 11y ago
  Life is still terrible for a lot of people - it is terrible for all poor people - it is terrible for all poor men and women - and it is terrible for all kinds of poor people. But that still doesn't take away the fact that India is changing dramatically for the better for everyone including men and women and lower castes and what not, and the pace of change is accelerating. But no matter how much it changes, some of these stories will be there even decades from now. The only reason reporting such a story makes sense is when it is indicative of a larger trend and when the writer chose to link it to the dubious statistic, she gave her intent away. What the author needs to do is to dig deeper into the statistic, how is that collected, what is the segmentation and then align that research with broader economic and social trends to get a true picture. Only after all of this is done that she can take pick an anecdotal case and use that to better articulate her findings. That research which changes everything wasn't done.

dankohn1 11y ago

Please realize that this article is not fundamentally about India, nor just about the plight of rural women there. It is about injustice, and the aspiration to improve yourself, and the obstacles that prevent that. The kind of taboos that were enforced against these women can be found in all traditional cultures, from the rural South in the US today to many Catholic developing world countries. All of us should be grateful that we were not raised in an environment where we were told not to do untraditional things, with the warning backed up by the threat of violence.

known 11y ago

A nation of 1.3 billion psychopaths https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15/a-fascinating-map-of-the-worlds-most-and-least-racially-tolerant-countries/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15...