Today my husband and me were chatting in the evening. I was telling him about a great speaker whom I just listened to a couple of days back in a "Women at MyOffice" club meeting. He got terribly frustrated. He wondered why we had to have these women's clubs? This definitely adds to the segregation. Why be treated special? Then he went on to ranting about how women in IIT were useless and then says they didn't even look pretty.
Of course that got me upset and I decided to defend my sex. After the hour long battle, we gave up and decided to talk about the N-Deal. Anyways let me not get started on that. After that I started reflecting on why these so called clubs had started. I was a part of women at school of CS at CMU as well. I think here in the US, they do see that these are ways of motivating women to get into engineering or help women at work. Yes we do see fewer women at research firms and so a club gives them a boost. Though I hate to agree with the husband, I have to say that having the clubs makes people think of us as special.
Thankfully through my first job at bombay, then graduate school and now working in the US, I've not faced any discrimination. In fact I've never felt any different. I've joined these clubs just to socialize and find people to hang out with. However what gives me a lot of pain is the fact that during my under graduation, I was acutely aware of being a women. I loved my hostel and the fun I had there but the place is known for being terribly male chauvinistic. In fact it goes to point where the rules differ based on your sex.
PSG Tech though very well renowned has to take a few classes on gender equality. The hostel rules were different for boys and girls. We had to get back to hostel by 6:30 PM whereas the boys could get back by 10 PM. So they got to use the cool lab facilities, play more tennis and hang out at different places in CBE. While we women were watched for improper behavior(which meant getting back after 7 PM) or hanging out with people of the opposite sex. I agree we were in a more conservative part of the country but still how can you foster good engineering education when you treat two students of the same grade differently just based on their gender? My blood boils when I think of the professors such as Mu, krish etc who used to be our hostel wardens. The moral police who felt that if you hung out with a couple of boys, it meant you were eloping etc. I guess the intention was to make sure kids study and don't get into romantic complications. However even if a girl and boy were to do something isn't talking to them a solution? Should one threaten and place bans? Plus after a point let them decide how to handle their life.
I was quite active in high school with various co-curricular activities. However at PSG, I restricted myself to tennis and some literary events. Dramatics was dominated by the boys. Plus if the girls were to put up a play there would have been a zillion restrictions. So most of us decided just not to act and put up the fun plays for hostel. I can imagine like my husband, some boy would have thought us girls to be useless. We could have rallied our cause but most of us just decided to have our own fun. However there were a couple of people like me who took part at certain college events like woodstock, some debates, dumbc(only girls team) and tried to break the rule. However I am very sorry to say there was no president of the college who was a women and no path breaker. We just thought it was too much of an effort. Plus being an autonomous institute, our grades would have gone down the drain and few were willing to take the risk. I am sure it's the same now and it saddens me. 5 years out of college, I find women acting just like men in all parts of the world. I mean we are just as capable as other humans. When will my college change? Or has it?
