Another year, another March 8, another reason to focus on women as the neglected cause… But what has changed between this date on 2014 and today? If there isn’t much that has changed, there is still hope the next year does bring some transformation even if it’s in ways of thinking.
Often, when women’s problems are a subject of discussion, men are kept out of it. It is a debate that is mostly conducted exclusively amongst women. This we clearly see as something that perpetuates the problem instead of solving it.
So this time, we decided to juxtapose the women’s point of view against men’s. We picked young men and women, aged between 18 and 25, and asked them about how they look at gender roles and the problems therein.
We decided to ask young boys/men as to how they look at the women problem and their own role? Do they see a problem with the men’s role in society and why is it so. Do they see a problem with how men are raised, starting with their own mothers? Is there a peer pressure to act in a manly way? What is their understanding of gender and feminism? How can men add to the debate on feminism and make things better for women? How can the violence against women be removed, in their opinion?
Likewise, we asked women to explain the sense of discrimination as experienced by them in their own lives and suggest how men could help achieve a "social transformation".
This juxtaposition of men’s and women’s point of view is what we feel has been missing from the debate. These might look like the worldviews of the very urban privileged classes, considering the constraint of the language divide the English language journalism operates in, but they do hint at some key issues that will broaden our understanding of women’s problems from the point of view of both genders.