The week was spent in further reflection 🤔 on the biases women and men have against the feminine gender, and how these ingrained prejudices form our gender social norms.
Biased gender social norms mean “the undervaluation of women’s capabilities and rights in society.
“(They) constrain women’s choices and opportunities by regulating behaviour and setting the boundaries of what women are expected to do and be,” the UNDP 2023 Gender Social Norms Index (GSNI) Report explained.”
After resolving the misleading UNDP statistical probability reported by The Guardian, snap surveys among random groups of people during the week showed that both men and women normalise bias against women, going by the 4 dimensions and 7 indicators in the report.
According to the UNDP, “the Gender Social Norms Index (GSNI) captures beliefs on gender equality in capabilities and rights.
The report stresses that the GSNI approach “differs from achievement-based objective measures of gender equality, which assess gender gaps in terms of outcomes.”
Instead, “by focusing on beliefs, biases and prejudices, it provides an in-depth account of the root causes of gender inequality that hinder progress for women and girls.”
So, last week, we asked: “Could these beliefs include those about God? Could our religious biases be the root causes of gender social norms that are unfair to women? Could our misguided pieties blind us to prejudices against the girl child?”
We attempted answers to these slippery belief questions.
And here they are.
First, we discovered that countries which have higher populations of people who do not believe in God – atheists and agnostics – tend to have lower bias against women.
In short, the fewer the atheists and agnostics in a country, the higher the number of people with biases against women.
As you would expect, our research showed the opposite was the case in countries where religious people dominated.
The more religious people in a country, the more the biased people against women there.
Why is this so?
And what has belief in God got to do with this?
The Religious Construct of the Feminine Physique
The majority of the world religions reviewed in this research view the female physical body as a sub-construct of the masculine body.
This is the case in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The etymolgy of the word woman evolves from nothing else than her physical proximity to a man.
Notice that her own unique temperaments and mental lationshicapacities were not factored into her designation as woman.
And all the other biases follow from the obsession with the body rather than the mind of a woman.
For instance, in the paper “The Discrimination of Women in Buddhism: An Ethical Analysis”, Archana Paudel and Qun Dong wrote:
“Women are not considered as a complete entity in Buddhism. Their body is not considered fit to attain enlightenment and become Buddha. There is a concept that women are not complete until they attain enlightenment to become reborn as a man. It is clearly stated in the Bahudhatuka-sutta that there could never be a female Buddha.”
This kind of religious bias against the equal integrity of female bodies with their male counterparts, a proxy for bias against their physical integrity, normalised worse socioeconomic repressions:
“(Women) were considered as being on the same level as the Sudras, the lowest of the four castes. Their freedom was extremely limited. The general view appears to be that they had to be under the care of parents in their childhood, under the protection of husbands in their youth; and in their old age they had to be under the control of their sons.”
Little wonder then why, among the four dimensions of discrimination against women, the bias against a woman’s body has the strongest connection to religious beliefs, at 0.55 çoefficient of coreĺàtion.
The Secular Construct of the Feminine Psyche
While patriarchal religious narratives dwell more on the physical otherness of the female, secular thoughts invest more thoughts on the complementary compensational attributes of the feminine psyche regarding the masculine.