The prejudice that women face is still present. Only, it has learnt to hide itself better.
It has been said that we now live in an egalitarian society, with little discrimination between the sexes, if any, and freedom for all. This self-congratulatory attitude, however, is a grave impediment to actually achieving such a thing. Only the blissfully ignorant would be unaware of some of the truths that stare us in the face today — it is still a man's world, despite the general feeling that sexism is nearly extinct. It is true that the blatant disregard for women's rights that was prevalent in the times of Kamala Das and Emma Goldman is no longer such a great issue in many parts of the world. On the other hand, this progress has also allowed the emergence of a new, equally frightening kind of bigotry.
The prejudice that women face is still present. Only it has learnt to hide itself better. It has become something that insinuates itself into our subconscious minds, creeping into every hollow of our lives until we are no more conscious of its presence than we are of breathing. And it reveals itself in the most innocuous of ways, like how in a marriage the wife is expected to leave her life behind and move when her husband is offered a better job elsewhere; how women are portrayed in movies as being servile to men, and in how men and women in the workplace are given subtly different treatment. These assumptions of behaviour that we make are dangerous ones. Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness is a fascinating look into how a society functions without separate genders.
The “glass ceiling” that is so often talked about in the workplace isn't so much a ceiling as it is a kind of women-specific gravity. Bosses needn't be misogynists, but they can overlook women when it comes to promotions or important assignments. It was easy to give women the right to vote and to education because doing otherwise would involve active oppression. Whereas, trying to overcome the almost instinctive desire of preferring a man to a woman for something when unearned would involve initiative, and overcoming the inertia of bias.
Then there are the bolder, more visible signs that nothing at all has changed. Everyday, there are reports — that read more like horror stories — of women being raped and killed in alleyways, molested by the very people in whom the public is supposed to place its faith, trafficked in inhuman conditions and treated like slaves. The social double-standard is also still firmly in place. In India, any family would prefer a fair-skinned, slim and tall daughter, if they must have one at all. Sons, on the other hand, are welcome in whatever colour, shape or form.
Parents desperate for male children still murder their infant daughters in brutal ways; women on roads and in other public areas are still fair game for people to leer and make passes at, while crowds of passive onlookers look on; wives are still expected to bear the brunt of household chores, duties and taking care of the children even if they have jobs themselves. The disadvantages of being a woman today are not so plain — but like wounds that appear healed when they actually fester underneath — are still present.
People cannot claim to belong to a truly progressive society unless any and all prejudices based on sex and other such ‘differences' are erased. It has taken us several decades to come this far, but it needn't take several more to scrape away the remnants of old habits. Women definitely have more freedom now — socially and economically — than in the past. But that men and women are treated even nearly as equals, is up for solid debate...
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