Tradition

Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is perceived as an important tool for women’s empowerment through which women can break different sociocultural barriers. But a qualitative study conducted among 45 married urban women in Delhi and Yamuna Nagar district of Haryana explains how education is used to maintain the existing gender hierarchies and gender division of labour. It highlights that reproduction and transformation of social structures are evident in a novel manner where ideas of women’s emancipation and subordination coexist.

One of the main offshoots of the phenomenal growth of satellite TV has been the media focus on women both as a key target audience as well as the main protagonists. The portrayal of women and the family has accentuated the women movement's growing concerns over the discriminatory nature of the family. Media research must go beyond auditing media content and quantifying acts of omission, bias, stereotyping, violations and distortions and consider how media is able to create a day-to-day communication with a cross section of the audience and in particular, with women, using tried and tested symbols, identifiable associations, safe narrative structures and a mundane and everyday situational framework.