Wednesday 9 May 2012

Short Take: On Reservation for Men and Women in Colleges

(This is a comment on the article "Of chick charts, hen charts and other such women’s stories" by Saba Dewan, published by Kafila.org. I tried posting this yesterday on Kafila, but it was not published. I hope it was unintentional, and I have tried posting it again. Will update here if it is posted. - 10:41 am, 9 May 2012
Update: The comment has been posted - 11:06 pm, 9 May 2012)

Loved the post, except for the last point. How exactly is reservation for boys antithetical to gender equity? The points about the struggles women have had to wage to make all the advances they have made are all well taken. But aren't men victims of patriarchy too, at some level? In our society, there is pressure on men to take up "manly" vocations like engineering and business management, while women are encouraged to take up humanities. It is no surprise then that engineering colleges are mostly male-dominated whereas arts and science colleges are increasingly becoming female-dominated. The latter trend is accentuated also by the fact of there being fewer men's colleges compared to women's colleges, say in Delhi.

If Stephens started off as a boys' college, I don't see what the harm is in providing for some reservation to ensure that the proportion of boys don't fall below a minimum threshold. In the medium-to-long run, perhaps we should press for reservations for both women and men (say, 33% each?) in every college - arts & science, professional - all of them - to ensure that the composition of students in terms of gender is not too skewed.

At a more basic level, we also need to ponder why there is a trend of girls outperforming boys in board exams which form the criteria for admission to arts and science colleges, while boys tend to do better in entrance exams for professional courses. Both the issues need careful examination and corrective measures might be necessary. These are not trivial questions to be dismissed with contempt. A serious consideration of these issues are necessary if, among others, generations of boys turning resentful, hostile towards all attempts to bring about gender equity and treating feminism to be synonymous with man-hating is to be avoided.