Girls Are Weighed Down by Restrictions, Boys with Demands

According to the fifth National Family Health Survey, conducted between 2019 and 2021, about 23 per cent of Indian women aged twenty to twenty four had been married before the age of eighteen. In the same country, as the National Crime Records Bureau reports each year, roughly seven out of ten people who die by suicide are men. These two facts come from opposite ends of a single system. The topic describes it in a single line, that girls are weighed down by restrictions and boys by demands, and that both are harmful.

The restrictions on girls are familiar. A girl is told when to come home, what to wear, where to go and whom to speak to. Her safety is invoked as the reason, but the effect is to shrink her world. Simone de Beauvoir wrote in 1949 that one is not born but becomes a woman, and much of the becoming is a matter of learning where one cannot go. Women's labour force participation in India, which has hovered at levels far below that of men and below that of many comparable economies, reflects restrictions on mobility, safety, marriage and unpaid work in the home.

The harm is concrete. A girl who leaves school early because the journey is considered unsafe loses years of learning. A young woman denied the choice of her spouse or her career loses the right to shape her own life. In 2012 Malala Yousafzai was shot by the Taliban for the offence of going to school, and her case was extreme, but the principle of limiting a girl's education to protect an idea of honour operates quietly in many households. Restriction teaches caution so thoroughly that it can become an internal voice, and the girl begins to police herself.

Boys face a different pressure. From childhood they are told to be strong, to hide their feelings, to earn and to provide. The phrase man up is used to end a boy's tears. The psychologist Joseph Pleck described in the 1980s a strain in the male role, which arises when men are required to meet standards of toughness and success that few can attain and are punished for failure. A son is expected to become the breadwinner, to support his parents in old age, to marry and to maintain a household. The expectation does not fade when jobs are scarce.

A son is expected to become the breadwinner, to support his parents in old age, to marry and to maintain a household.

The consequences are also real. Young men in India study under immense pressure for examinations with a handful of places, and failure carries a heavy burden of shame. Men are far less likely than women to seek help for depression or distress, because to do so is to admit weakness. The suicide statistics, with men outnumbering women by a wide margin in most years, are one result. Others are the violence with which some young men prove their masculinity, the risks they take on roads and the drinking that numbs them. The demand to be strong makes many of them brittle.

It would be wrong, however, to say that the two harms are equal. Restrictions take away rights, such as education, movement and choice, that boys generally have by default. Demands add burdens, but the boy who bears them often keeps the freedom and the power that the girl does not. A man can be crushed by the demand to earn and still hold the decision on where the family lives. Treating the two as symmetrical risks hiding the fact that, across the world, women are still more often denied schooling, property, safety and a voice in public affairs.

At the same time, the two burdens are not separate. They are two halves of one script, which says that men are providers and protectors and women are dependants who must be protected. Because a girl is thought to need protection, she is confined. Because a boy is thought to be the protector, he is loaded with duty and denied vulnerability. The father who will not let his daughter take a job and the father who tells his son he must earn well are following the same logic. Loosening one half of the script without the other may only move the burden around.

Evidence from change supports the view. Where women enter paid work, men are often relieved of being the sole earner, and families gain a safety net against the loss of a job. Studies of paternity leave in Scandinavian countries suggest that fathers who care for infants form closer bonds with their children, and that couples share the load more evenly. The Indian government's programmes for the education of girls, such as bicycles given to schoolgirls in Bihar, have raised enrolment and reduced early marriage, and the benefits go to brothers and future husbands as well. The gains of one group tend to arrive with the gains of the other.

Legal reform is necessary but not sufficient, because a script is enforced at the dinner table more than in a courtroom. The practical task is therefore to rewrite the script together. Schools can teach boys that emotions are not a weakness and teach girls that ambition is not a defect. Parents can share domestic work in front of their children, and laws can protect the freedom of women while recognising men as caregivers. The effort must resist the temptation to see the matter as a contest in which one side's suffering is used to deny the other's. The aim is a society in which a child is asked what he or she wishes to become and not what the sex requires.

A final uncertainty remains. Social scripts persist because people enforce them, and often those who suffer most from them are the ones who teach them to the next generation, with mothers restricting daughters out of fear and fathers pressing sons out of love. It is hard to tell where the first lesson came from, and harder to say who is able to stop teaching it. Each person who follows the script is both its prisoner and its guard, and the key may be in the hand of whoever is brave enough to stop.