Gender News - Frontline

Among female faculty, surveys have found a decline in representation as their seniority grew.

Indian women enter STEM fields in record numbers. But why do they vanish from academic positions?

While India boasts of a 40 per cent enrolment of women in STEM fields, they make up only 16 per cent of faculty positions. What is pushing them out?

Novelist Han Kang, delivers her first public speech after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature at the 18th Pony Chung Innovation Award ceremony in Seoul, South Korea, on October 17, 2024.

Korea through Han Kang’s The Vegetarian

Han’s novel critiques Korean society and the violence that lies beneath its surface. This year’s Nobel Prize honours her statement of resistance.

Stories that are close to the bone

From menstrual taboos to interfaith marriage: Shahina K. Rafiq’s unabashed collection reveals intimate truths of Indian women’s lives.

Chittajit Mitra

Rohini Godbole (1952-2024): The physicist who refused to choose between science and justice

She died as she lived—pursuing both particle physics and gender justice with equal passion at the Indian Institute of Science.

Nandita Jayaraj

Prime Minister Morarji Desai presenting the National UNESCO Award for 1977 to Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay in New Delhi on December 18, 1977.

Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay: The rebel who saw tomorrow

Nico Slate highlights how much of today’s feminist dialogue echoes feminist freedom fighter Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay’s ideas from decades ago.

Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta

Doctors intensify agitation with indefinite hunger strike to demand justice for R.G. Kar victim

Mass resignations of senior doctors follow as the government stalls on reforms, while Puja celebrations take on sombre tone amid the ongoing crisis.

Suhrid Sankar Chattopadhyay

Alma and her sisters

Anusua Mukherjee

More stories from Gender

The Union government concedes that marriage does not negate a woman’s consent and argues that violations of consent within marriage have different consequences than those outside marriage.

Supreme Court deliberations on marital rape exception could redefine consent within marriage

The Centre argues for maintaining ‘Marital Rape Exception’, but those seeking its repeal say it violates women’s rights, bodily autonomy, and dignity.

Carl Linnaeus, in a 1775 painting by Alexander Roslin. Linnaeus’ system could absorb the global scatter of plants. Explorers brought back forests entire, and here at last was a method to catalogue them. Once named, plants from anywhere became Europeanised as the rightful botany of Empire.

Linnaeus’ taxonomy and the roots of scientific bias

His plant classification system, based on sexual characteristics, reinforced binary gender concepts and facilitated colonial botanical appropriation.

People raise slogans outside West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee‘s residence as they wait to know the conclusion of the meeting between Mamata and the protesting junior doctors, in Kolkata on September 16.

West Bengal’s doctors have won a battle, but can they cure a sick system?

Protests over the brutal crime, which forced even Mamata Banerjee to yield, revealed deep-rooted corruption in the State’s medical education system.

Suhrid Sankar Chattopadhyay

Women tie rakhi on Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde’s wrist after the launch of the Mukhyamantri Majhi Ladki Bahin scheme, at Vidhan Bhavan in Mumbai on June 29.

Maharashtra’s Ladki Bahin scheme: Great expectations?

A Rs.46,000 crore scheme promising Rs.1,500 monthly to 2.5 crore women launches just months before elections, but critics question its sustainability.

The former Supreme Court judge explains why the recent rape and murder of the medic in Kolkata cannot come under this Bill.

Aparajita Bill a political gimmick to divert attention from unrest over RG Kar: Justice Asok Ganguly

The former Supreme Court judge explains why the recent rape and murder of the medic in Kolkata cannot come under this Bill.

Suhrid Sankar Chattopadhyay

Former Supreme Court Justice Asok Kumar Ganguly says that the Aparajita Bill, which makes the death penalty mandatory for the offence of rape, might not see the light of day since a mandatory death penalty provision has already been declared ultra vires the Constitution by the Supreme Court.

Aparajita Bill is a virtual non-starter: Asok Kumar Ganguly

The former Supreme Court judge explains why the recent rape and murder of the medic in Kolkata cannot come under this Bill.

Suhrid Sankar Chattopadhyay

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee during the Assembly session in Kolkata on September 3. While she has called the Aparajita Bill historic, women’s rights activists and lawyers call it anti-feminist.

Aparajita Bill: A knee-jerk reaction

Brought in response to the Kolkata hospital rape and murder, the Bill has been universally panned as regressive, unconstitutional, and anti-feminist.

Suhrid Sankar Chattopadhyay

The actor Kollam Thulasi addresses a dharna by film and television artistes demanding the implementation of the Justice Hema Committee report, in Thiruvananthapuram on September 4. Thulasi was in the news recently for revelations about the exploitation of female actors in the Malayalam film industry.

Hema Committee report can be a catalyst for structural change in Malayalam cinema

The report’s release could facilitate the overhaul of workplace practices and address long-standing issues concerning women in all film industries.

The actor Sruthi Hariharan, with the actor Chetan Ahimsa and FIRE president Kavitha Lankesh, addressing the media in Bengaluru in October 2018. Sruthi’s allegations against the actor Arjun Sarja ground her career to a temporary halt.

The conspiracy of silence in Tamil and Kannada film industries

Hardly innocent of sexual abuse, they now face pressure to reform as the Hema Committee report forces uncomfortable truths into the spotlight.

Fans of the actor Prabhas celebrating his movie release in front a theatre in Khammam in August 2019.

Telugu cinema: A male stranglehold

A 2019 committee studied gender bias and sexual harassment in an industry controlled by patriarchal caste groups, but the report remains unpublished.

The press conference by the Women in Cinema Collective in Kochi on October 13, 2018. It was a watershed movement in the feminist labour history of Kerala, where women forefronted themselves on the basis of their work.

Lights, camera, litigation: Hema Committee report spotlights Malayalam cinema’s gender battleground

The precarity of women and other marginalised communities in Malayalam cinema reflects Kerala’s hierarchical, feudal, and patriarchal society.

Aparna Eswaran,Silpa Satheesh,Arathi P.M.

Editor’s Note: A powerful, defining moment

The Hema Committee Report shows there is hope that the omertà enforced by powerful men in the film industry will be broken.

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