Gender justice

Females constitute almost half of the world's population. Yet, they have almost always been looked down upon, and have been treated disproportionately and unfairly often as an inferior gender. Conventionally, women have been treated as chattel, as the property in the patriarchal society. They have been bound by various dogmatic practices shackled with fake cultural backdrops. Various social reformers have worked, and continue to work tirelessly to ameliorate the daily lives of the womenfolk. A Lot has been changed but nothing valuable has been achieved even in the 21st century. This paper attempts to assess the main causes behind gender inequality. It looks at glass ceilings as one of the important impediments to gender justice. Here in this paper I will test this hypothesis whether glass ceiling is an invisible barrier that impedes gender justice. How the concept of glass ceiling has different existence in the developing v/s developed world. How it is kind of barricading in front of women that prevents them from reaching a hierarchical position. We will also discuss a few legal tracks to deal with and to break this layer of glass ceiling and to encourage women participation in economic activities.

Philosopher Nancy Fraser thinks much of the disadvantage women face in employment has to do with gender norms that structure the labor market. Also important is that many employers reward workers who relegate their care responsibilities to family members or the market. Fraser's proposal, the Universal Caregiver model, would build institutions on the assumption that everyone has important caregiving responsibilities. Fraser provides merely a sketch of this model, and its viability depends on consideration of the concrete policy proposals that would need to be in place. My project is to fill in Fraser's sketch and consider policies from other theorists working on the issue. I argue that the Universal Caregiver model is justified because caregiving is a basic need of persons as citizens and because current arrangements are unjust along gender lines.

Androcentrismo, derecho y discurso. Argumentar desde el lenguaje. Las nuevas categorías sociales en la tarea juridico-argumentativa. La develación de estereotipos de género como presupuesto de la imparcialidad y no discriminación. Abordaje de los estereotipos de genero en el Sistema Interamericano de DDHH. Pautas para tener en cuenta al argumentar con enfoque de género.

Despite debate about the status of women faculty within U.S. universities, the discourse of gender equity often follows genderist and heterosexist logics (e.g., only two genders, oriented along heterosexual lines). In this qualitative study, I draw on the perspectives of trans* faculty to explore the ways that participants re-conceptualized gender equity, in what I call academic gender justice. Participants indicated that collecting data about trans* people is critically important, but there are potential challenges with this approach. Participants also indicated that unsettling existing logics of the family and expanding understanding about the unique forms of oppression that face trans* faculty are important in re-conceptualizing gender equity. Taken together, I bring participant’s disparate perspectives together under the concept of academic gender justice. In so doing, I argue that an intersectional approach to addressing gender-based oppression is an important mechanism to reduce the negative effects of such oppression.

Feminists have long argued that women who offend are judged by who they are, not what they do, with idealised images of femininity and motherhood used as measures of culpability. The ability to meet the expectations of motherhood and femininity are particularly difficult for women who experience a crisis pregnancy, as evident in cases where women have been convicted of concealment of birth. The offence prohibits the secret disposal of the dead body of a child, to conceal knowledge of its birth. Traditionally used to prosecute women suspected of killing their newborn children, analysis of court transcripts suggests the offence is also used to punish women who fail to meet expectations of motherhood. This paper analyses three contemporary cases in light of the historical origins of the offence, illustrating the legacy of prejudice against ‘deviant’ mothers. Finally, it questions the continued existence of this archaic offence.

What are the root causes of discrimination against women in Bangladesh and why do Bangladeshi women keep silent against the discrimination?
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This paper depicts the discrimination against women in Bangladesh in Constitution, Politics, Decision making, Education and so on. It looks on how vulnerable are women in Bangladesh, Why women keep silent against discrimination. The research is based on CEDAW laws (The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women), and gives a brief introduction what is CEDAW and how far these laws are implemented in Bangladesh. My study finds that social, cultural traditions and belief, weak and unwilling governmental actions cause the discrimination against women in Bangladesh. Discrimination against women in Bangladesh is linked thru deeply rooted local norms, cultures and traditions. Women believe what their mother, grandmothers, elderly taught to them. So in almost all cases women do not complain or do not go against any discrimination. On the other hand, most women are not aware of their rights because of poverty, illiteracy. However, situation could have been better if government introduced and strictly implemented rules and laws that secure women’s rights. At the end, the paper gives some recommendations to the problem.

This chapter discusses the question of how to design public policies that are informed by gender justice. It looks at the main policies that have been proposed by feminists and whose aim is to achieve a more just distribution of the burdens of social cooperation between women and men. Some of these have been defended as a way of giving due recognition to care work and freeing women from economic dependency on their spouses. Others have been defended as a way of resisting the traditional division of labour between women and men and getting closer to a gender-egalitarian society.

Talaq-e-biddat has been a source of severe oppression and injustice for Muslim women. The practice results in the unilateral breakdown of a marriage at the whim of the husband. The judicial trend has evolved against the practice since the courts have, at several occasions, declared the practice to be unacceptable with certain qualifications. In Shayara Bano v. Union of India, the Supreme Court conclusively struck down this practice. Subsequently, the Parliament came up with the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill, 2017 which declared the practice as void and illegal. The Bill also makes the practice a non bailable and cognizable offence and provides imprisonment of three years for the same. The authors critically examine the bill and conclude that criminalising an act of private nature would have adverse repercussions on the institution of marriage. Although the Bill might prohibit triple talaq, it seems highly improbable that it would effectively achieve its objective of protecting the rights of married Muslim women at the same time. The authors suggest an alternative scheme which would achieve the objective of the Bill while overcoming its limitations. https://www.sociolegalreview.com/post/criminalisation-of-triple-talaq-dissecting-the-constitutional-and-socio-legal-aspects

This is a report based on a survey of 81 women lawyers in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. The survey specifically focused on women who have children. The study was confined to women lawyers who were mothers because women lawyers tend to opt out of the paid legal workforce or slow down after the birth of a child. The report offers insights on the barriers or biases that women lawyers faced in the profession and recommendations.

“A socially sensitized judge is a better armour in cases of crime against women than long clauses of penal provisions, containing complex exceptions and complicated provisions…” 
Violence against women is an issue prevalent in most of the societies, be it developed or developing. It has been accepted that the phenomenon of domestic violence has not been addressed socially, legally and politically in most of the cases. Domestic Violence is an issue that comprises gross violation of human rights. In this backdrop the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 (PWDVA, 2005) was enacted by the Indian Parliament. PWDVA has been paid considerable heed in India on grounds of its perceived ‘revolutionary’ nature. The Act appears to be an elixir for all evils and oppression which the women of India are suffering from within the four walls of their homes. However, there is trepidation that the revolutionary essence of the PWDVA may prove to be a serious impediment in its implementation in the long run given the largely conservative orientation of Indian judiciary. Judicial response to a legislation assesses the efficacy of a statute to a large extent.  This paper aims to critically analyze the judicial pronouncements apropos of domestic violence and related women’s rights issues. It also envisages future trends on issues related to the understanding of different dimensions of the PWDVA. The examination of some of the present day case laws on the subject provides an equivocal picture. Although there are instances where the judiciary has attempted to give complete and effective interpretation of the provisions of the Act, but at the same time, there are reported decisions which have narrowly and conservatively interpreted the prima facie liberal provisions and have challenged the existing notions of patriarchy and granted relief to women. Besides, institution of judiciary goes on to reinforce the stereotypical beliefs of how a woman living in India should behave. Further, the judiciary has often chosen a policy of non-interference while dealing with cases relating to violence against women since they perceive such matters to be in the private domain. Given this background, the paper will defend that despite the existence of the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 in place, what is needed is a radical change in the judicial mindset. The paper attempts to examine some of the cases relating to PWDVA, 2005 decided by the High Court at Calcutta. An endeavour has been made to meaningfully address the issues of empowerment of women in the context of the embeddedness of patriarchy and the subjugation of women, often brutally, supposedly in the most secure of spaces ie. their own homes

Care-supporting policies incentivise women’s withdrawal from the labour market, thereby reinforcing statistical discrimination and further undermining equality of opportunities between women and men for positions of advantage. This, I argue, is not sufficient reason against such policies. Supporting care also improves the overall condition of disadvantaged women who are care-givers; justice gives priority to the latter. Moreover, some of the most advantageous existing jobs entail excessive benefits; we should discount the value of allocating such jobs meritocratically. Further, women who have a real chance to occupy positions of advantage have most likely already enjoyed more than their fair share of opportunities; they lack a claim to more. Women can have a complaint grounded in the expressive disvalue of sexist discrimination. This gives them special claims against men occupying the vast majority of top positions and against their higher share of opportunities for positions of advantage. But their claim does not speak against care-supporting policies.

El presente artículo es una sistematización crítica de un libro, titulado En este lugar donde la cárcel de mujeres se convierte en un lugar etnográfico y sus internas en etnógrafas.  Representa un posicionamiento crítico frente al encierro femenino: su función social, las condiciones de vida de las mujeres privadas de libertad y el reclamo de sus derechos humanos.

This paper explores the contradictions and contestations that characterise debates about the relationship between paid work and women’s empowerment. It suggests that this absence of consensus appears to reflect differences of context. It reflects other factors as well. It reflects changes in the social meaning of work over time. It reflects differences in the way that empowerment is conceptualised:  the emphasis given to the personal and the political, to individual and collective action, and to agency versus structure in processes of change. Finally, contestations reflect the nature of the work in question, since varying terms and conditions of work hold out varying potentials for transformative change in women’s lives. Evidence suggests that shifts in the balance of power within individual women’s lives do not necessarily translate into shifts in underlying structures of constraint. The paper suggests that it is the capacity of women to organise around their needs, interests and rights that is most likely to result in public recognition of their rights as workers, as women and as citizens.

India has ratified many international conventions on women rights. The Constitution itself condemns discrimination and exploitation on the basis of gender. Overall the judiciary and the Indian Constitution have shown its soft side towards the issues related to women. But, is that enough? The truth is that it has not been successful in promoting human rights of one such section which is in dire need of realization of its rights. The pity state of women engaged in prostitution is evident from the violence they are subjected to every day, every night. They are for their customers nothing but a piece of meat. They are bound to consume them as they are ‘men’. Prostitutes are discriminated at the hands of police, courts and employers. Even if they want to get out of the caucus, they are forced back into there as now she is ‘impure’ and a hurt to the society. She will not be given any decent job as she is deemed to be capable of only one job, the job of entertainment in the bed. Lately, concerns relating to health, safety and security of the sex workers and their children have come up. Extortion, pimping and coercion force them into the industry. Many a times, poor parents who could not repay a loan send their minor children to the industry.  Redefining prostitution as ‘sex work’ and further on legalizing and decriminalizing sex work in order to protect the human rights and health of sex workers in India is a new idea emerging.

One important feature of Islamophobia is to caricature Islam as
misogynistic and oppressive to women and thus to advance imperialist hegemony. This “gendered Islamophobia” stigmatizes the religion even though, compared to other world religions, its treatment of women is arguably preferable and more enlightened. Historically, one treasonous use of feminism
has been to misappropriate it in order to serve colonial interests and support imperialist wars of occupation that repress subjugated people including women and children. This article argues that ignorance about, and prejudice against,
Islam contribute to portraying it as a misogynistic creed. Wrong notions of Islam lead many feminists in Muslim societies to denigrate Islamic teachings and borrow Western ideas to advance women’s causes. Lampooning Islam and replicating Western feminist ideas in Muslim lands have served neither women nor feminism. Such feminist tendencies rather give a bad name to the women’s rights movement and fuel controversy, anger and resentment among Muslims.

Transforming the world of work to meet the challenges posed  by global inequality and the gender gap requires a gender lens. The leadership of women in trade unions and civil society organizations is an imperative to face these challenges, together with rising fascism, xenophobic nationalism, and climate change. It is therefore especially appropriate that at the Centennial of the International Labor Organization, negotiations toward the first international labor standard addressing gender based violence in the world of work are informed by and inform broader discussions on the Future of Work. Ending gender based violence and harassment (GBHV) is one key component of bringing a gender justice approach to global supply chains- specifically fast fashion.  This report—the first in the series, Gender Justice on Garment Global Supply Chains: An Agenda to Transform Fast-Fashion—provides a roadmap for international legal frameworks, criteria for corporate accountability initiatives, and a transformative new prevention approach from the Asia Floor Wage Alliance to end GBVH on garment production lines.

A few days back, I attended a seminar on `Violence Against Marginalized Women and Gender Justice’. The seminar discussed about issues relating to various subgroups within the category `women’ like widows, dalit women, tribal women, refugee women, so on and so forth. The deliberations made me think as to who constitute `marginalized women’ when `women’ being women are marginalized in the patriarchal world.  Women as a `category’ or as a `group’ in comparison to `men’ have been relegated to margins due to systemic and structural discrimination within the society. Women, irrespective of their hierarchical status, ranking or background, face violence within public and private spaces, they are being doubly discriminated and denied of the basic rights and are often oppressed by norms, culture and customs in a male dominated world where capitalism and globalization commodifies and objectifies women.  Considering this aspect, the term `marginalized women’ needs rethinking as to which of the subgroup of category `women’ may be classified as `marginalized women’ and whether these marginalized women can use marginality as a site to contest for their rights and entitlements.

The case study discussed in this Evidence Report explores the value and limitations of collective action in challenging the community, political, social and economic institutions that reinforce harmful masculinities and gender norms related to sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV).

As such, the concept of structural violence is used to locate SGBV in a social, economic and political context that draws histories of entrenched inequalities in South Africa into the present. The research findings reinforce a relational and constructed understanding of gender emphasising that gender norms can be reconfigured and positively transformed.

We argue that this transformation can be catalysed through networked and multidimensional strategies of collective action that engage the personal agency of men and women and their interpersonal relationships at multiple levels and across boundaries of social class, race and gender. This collectivity needs to be conscious of and engaged with the structural inequalities that deeply influence trajectories of change. Citizens and civil society must work with the institutions – political, religious, social and economic – that reinforce structural violence in order to ensure their accountability in ending SGBV.

We urgently need reforms in the manner in which Muslim personal law is understood and practiced in India today. We need to bring about laws based on the principles of justice and fairness enshrined in the Quran. Muslim countries such as Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and closer home even Bangladesh and Pakistan have codified personal laws dealing with marriage, divorce, guardianship and property. India may be an exception to the rule with a consistent ambiguity and obfuscation that guides these important components in a married couple’s life. Plus, it clearly renders the woman believer as second class! Horrific practices such as triple talaq and halala bring a lot of suffering to ordinary women and also a bad name to the community! As several scholars have pointed out, the Muslim Personal Law prevalent in India is a large body of uncodified laws which have been a creation of the colonial British rule. It is applied to Muslims as a matter of legal policy and not as religious tenets.  The large-scale misinterpretations provide evidence about this. Therefore, reform would be a step forward in the direction of attaining Quranic justice and not the other way round as it is made out to be!

We Are All In This Together is a survey of 10 years of Justseeds member production in solidarity with social movements. This catalog was produced from an exhibition curated by Interference Archive volunteers, and contains 48 pages of color photographs of the installation and graphics. Narrowed down to 7 themes, raging from Anti-war to Gender Justice to Migration, it illustrates the role artists play in grassroots organizing. The original exhibition was held at the Purchase College-SUNY, in the Fall of 2017.

Design of the catalog was created by Community Design, a hands-on design studio class at Purchase College-SUNY, with Madeline Freidman as lead designer.

Accompanying texts written by the Interference Archive curators; Nora Almeida, Kevin Caplicki, Bonnie Gordon, Amber Hickey, Amy Roberts, Melissa Sions and Michelle Wilson.

This report addresses a worrying gap in the knowledge about the effective resettlement of girls and young women. Reviewing research literature in a number of relevant areas, it cross-references evidence of what works in the resettlement of young people with what we know about the wider need of girls and young women. This iterative synthesis approach thus provides a gender-sensitive approach to inform policy and practice development in resettlement for this specific group.

This paper presents an account of liberal feminism as a capacious family of doctrines. The account is capacious in the sense that it sweeps in a wide variety of doctrines, including some thought to be challenges to liberal feminism, and allows us to refer to doctrines with more than one label—so we can identify, for example, care-ethical liberal feminism, socially conservative liberal feminism, and liberal socialist feminism. The capacious account also provides a conceptual framework to allow us to think with greater clarity about the scope of liberal feminist claims to justice, and about how that justice is to be secured and sustained. Since there is such variety within the liberal feminist family of doctrines, it makes little sense to criticize or defend liberal feminism simpliciter. The capacious account both requires and makes it possible for us to eschew such talk and focus instead on the particular doctrines we have in mind.

En su nueva obra, María Luisa Femenías desarrolla la temática de la violencia contra las mujeres desde la perspectiva del lenguaje (entendiendo el discurso en un sentido foucaultiano), las construcciones identitarias, la invisibilización, el multiculturalismo, el fenómeno de la globalización y las nociones de ceguera genérica y ethos anacrónico. Multiculturalis-mo, identidad y violencia es de especial interés para aquellos que se inician en la perspectiva feminista, ya que establece los nudos básicos para visibilizar y comprender la agresión contra las mujeres en el mundo contemporáneo. Pero también es de interés para lectores más avanzados, dado que expone en detalle algunas problemáticas actuales desde una lectura crítica de sexo-género. En este libro, segundo volumen de la colección Los Ríos Subterráneos-el primero es Violencias cotidianas (en la vida de las mujeres) y el tercero (próximo a aparecer) se titulará Aspectos del discurso jurídico-, María Luisa Femenías presenta un análisis de tópicos fundamentales para comprender los mecanismos de la violencia contra las mujeres, a fin de visibilizarla y lograr desarticularla. Para ello, parte de la idea de que este tipo de violencia es constante y sostenida a través de geografías, clases sociales, niveles culturales y creencias religiosas, e incluye el maltrato físico explícito (violaciones, golpes, incluso la muer-te), el verbal explícito (insultos, gritos, amenazas) y el psicológico (amedrentamiento, descalificación, minusvaloración). Por lo cual insta a preguntarnos ¿cuáles son los factores que favorecen y potencian estas violencias? ¿En qué presupuestos se basan? Y, fundamentalmente, ¿por qué se las minimiza hasta considerarlas "normales"?

Women’s political participation has been a key area of feminist activism in the
region with women’s access to formal political power understood axiomatically as a resource which must be secured. The Caribbean’s boast of the Americas’ first elected woman head of government in 1980 and two women prime ministers serving simultaneously in Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago suggest that the study of women’s political participation in the region should be of global interest. This timely volume returns to familiar Caribbean feminist territory by offering a feminist analysis of the state, breaking new ground in assessing feminist strategies of various kinds of state engagement. As a text which claims that its “aim was to gather original data that examined four feminist strategies to advance gender justice – women’s political leadership, national gender policies, electoral quota systems and transformational leadership”, the first chapter by editor Gabrielle Hosein disappoints as it reproduces biographical summaries of women political leaders in the Caribbean, the bulk of which are taken from Cynthia Barrow-Giles’ notable Women in Caribbean Leadership (2011). This shaky start notwithstanding, the collection resounds with the cutting voices and forceful analyses of notable Caribbean feminist activists whose reflections and thought are not frequently captured in scholarship make it a singular and delightful text.

Evidence suggests that despite repeated mandates by the United Nations (UN) for gender equality, local gender justice for girls has been elusive. Conceptually drawn from Merry’s human rights-cultural particularism dissonance and Sen’s comparative justice theories, the purpose of this grounded theory study, supported by Clarke’s situational analysis, was to investigate how local religious and cultural  practices impedes a gender equality outcome for girls. The primary research question involved identifying characteristics and situations of actors who focused solely on gender, culture, and human rights issues at the international and national level. A qualitative research design was used in this study of 8 experts in gender, human rights, and cultural issues who were interviewed in-depth in person and on the telephone. A line-by-line analysis of participants’ responses identified specific sub theme situations related to the study that included sociocultural, socioeconomic, and intercultural elements. In addition, open and selected coding of participants’ responses uncovered critical gender related themes that included democracy, political governance, and fatherhood responsibility. Implications for social change include indentifying a gender justice approach to human rights in which to implement integrated gender focused programs advocated by civil society and the UN to fill gaps left by governments.The findings suggest that obtaining children human rights is a function of the effect of a girl’s access to gender justice and a culture’s response to social development with an outcome of gender equality. This can result in advancement of gender justice, which research indicates can substantially improve local and global communities socially, economically, and politically.

There is ample evidence to suggest a strong correlation between gender inequality and food and nutrition insecurity, yet the policy discourse around food and nutrition security in India has largely been gender-blind. This paper, based on a review of existing literature and emerging research, emphasizes the need to place gender justice at the center of all food and nutrition interventions, if food and nutrition security for all is to be achieved. Rather than exclusively targeting women and often overburdening them with the responsibility for household food security, policy approaches need to encourage and enhance reciprocity and sharing between men and women in households and communities, and empower them to negotiate effectively vis-A -vis institutions of the state, markets, and society. With the aim of moving toward gender-transformative approaches in policies and programs for achieving food and nutrition security in India, in this paper we set out an alternate framing of the agend...