Unsafe at any place

Hema Committee underlines the distance to gender equality

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Over the past two decades, the Indian workplace has made noticeable progress in terms of gender inclusiveness. Women figure in far larger numbers than before in professions that were previously considered male bastions, from accountancy and finance, information technology to medicine, engineering, aeronautics, and defence. However, recent revelations in the Justice Hema Committee report on women working in the Malayalam film industry and the course of events following the rape and murder of a medical student in Kolkata's R G Kar hospital point to a disturbing regression. Both incidents reflect the amplification of innate gender chauvinism into tacitly accepted violence against women.