Gender inequality is a common problem …. well according to the
‘wimmin of the left’ in the West. However they largely focus on the fact that if a woman takes career time off to have children, she sometimes doesn’t get promoted as fast as a male colleague when she eventually returns to the workforce. A fallacious argument at best, but one that has traction with women writers in the media and especially in the BBC.
However, there is in fact a form of gender inequality that is practised worldwide, outside of the West, which is birth selection. This has been exacerbated by the ability of doctors to tell prospective parents the likely sex of their next child in the womb ….. so in many cultures, if it’s a girl child, the child is aborted or killed. If you work with Asians at work gently ask around, you will be surprised how many of them have a first born son … far more in fact than the laws of chance would seem to predict.
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This Is Not Necessarily An Innocent Scene .... |
An example of this kind of mindset was seen recently in Pakistan, where a man called Umar Zaib, threw his one-and-a-half years old daughter into the river Ravi to drown ... when his wife tried to save the child, he beat her back with his fists. The wife later told the police and reporters that
"Since our first daughter has born, he wasn't happy, he wanted a son. He said if I had another daughter, he'd kill our first child, Zainab. When, eight weeks ago, I did have another girl, he kept threatening more and more, then he did it."