Problems Female Face in Academia

1.1: Introduction and background:

Gender inequality is exists in Pakistan in terms of health, education, employment or any other area of national life. And unfortunately, this has been known for a long time, but no dominant efforts have been made to address this concern, and that is because, our society is a patriarchal society, where people's perception of women being inferior to men in every aspect.

Some moves have been taken and efforts have been done to increase the enrolment of girls in schools, but it does not go far enough. They have helped only in a small way to decrease the socio-economic gap between the two genders. As long as women and girls are not accepted as individuals in their own right, and are seen merely as wives, mothers and daughters, and as long as laws and traditions continue to discriminate against them, there is little chance of their catching up with the men. The illiteracy rate among adult Pakistani women is over 25% higher than that of the adult male population. Girls are not provided with proper educational institutes or educational facilities, that is there are not even proper schools and colleges in most of the rural areas. In one of the province, the literacy rate of the female population is a merely 19%, much below the national average. By keeping this picture in mind that the government must improve educational facilities for girls. However, such an action would only be cosmetic unless accompanied by a strong effort to change existing mindsets that currently see women as unequal to men.

BACKGROUND:

Studying in an institute having Mixed-sex Education (also known as Co-Education), for girl, is quite hard. They face difficulty in almost each and every step. They face discrimination in class room, got influenced by their group members thus adopting negative traits, transport problem and much more. Most people think that these problems are directly related to women's behavior and her character.

In Pakistan these problems are getting more worse than ever, and one of the reason of this worse situation is that people are getting influenced by other cultures and adapting western culture in a country that already has an eastern culture are bring a bunch of problems. One of these problems is the difficulties that female students are facing in acquiring the quality education. The recent example can be observe from the commerce college Muzaffaragarh where a boy had allegedly raped a girl of BCom (Part-I) in the vicinity of the college in 2009 but no action was initiated against him. It is said that the girl concerned left the college after the incident. No action, however, was taken against the culprit. 'Consequently the female students feel insecure while the college administration is mum over the grave situation,' it became the common practice of the accused the female student by that the male students often enters the girls' common room and threaten them, asking to 'settle' with them. The female students of the college are of the view that if this issue was discussed with their parents they might ask them to leave the college, thus depriving them from continuing their studies.

Reference:

http://www.interface.edu.pk/students/April-10/Govt-Commerce-College-Muzaffargarh-students-problems.asp (last viewed at 2nd may 2010)

This discrimination is not only in Pakistan but the whole world is surrounded by the discrimination between the two genders that is the male and female.

In those countries where the culture is different than those of the eastern countries, female students of these western countries also face some of the same problems in certain situation and in some educational fields like The University Of Houston Cullen College Of Engineering is addressing the shortage of engineers facing the United States by tackling a related problem like the lack of women in engineering. Compared to the population as a whole, the percentage of female professional engineers is very small. Currently, females make up only 20% of engineering undergraduates, while women hold less than a quarter of jobs in all technical fields (not just engineering).

At the same time, the United States, which used to lead the world in the number of engineering degrees granted, has slid to fifth in that category. The most recent statistics show, in fact, that China is producing more than five times as many first degrees in engineering (the equivalent of a B.S.) than the United States.

Since the fields like engineering, computer sciences, media remain dominated by men; there are so few women majoring in engineering, educational institutions often fail to offer those who are in engineering enough supporting resources to guide them through