Feminism In India and Impact of Movie 'My Choice'

By: Aakash Tripathi and Siddharth Raina

Introduction:

The official definition of feminism as defined by Wikipedia states that feminism is a collection of movements and ideologies that share a common goal: to define, establish, and achieve equal political, economic, cultural, personal, and social rights for women. This includes seeking to establish equal opportunities for women in education and employment. A feminist advocates or supports the rights and equality of women.

Feminist movements have campaigned and continue to campaign for women's rights, including the right to vote, to hold public office, to work, to fair wages or equal pay, to own property, to education, to enter contracts, to have equal rights within marriage, and to have maternity leave etc. Feminists have also worked to promote bodily autonomy and integrity, and to protect women and girls from rape, sexual harassment, and domestic violence.

However in the modern times, it is very important to see if feminism is heading in the right direction and is actually working towards empowering women and providing them with equal rights and opportunities in all aspects of life including political, economic, cultural, personal, and social rights for women.

Feminism and feminist movements must be aimed at achieving these equal rights for both men and women. It must be recognised by our society that both men and women must be treated equally and be given equal rights in all aspects.

Motivation:

The idea of feminism essentially promotes equality for both men and women. However it is very important for people to understand the true meaning of the word and what feminist movements aim to achieve.

The first step to do so is to understand what kind of picture is created in the minds of people when they hear the word feminism. Hence we thought that a comprehensive survey would be a big step in understanding what people really understand by the word feminism

Approach:

A comprehensive questionnaire was created to understand what people think about feminism and feminist movements. This questionnaire involved a series of questions ranging from basic questions such as the interpretation of the word feminism by people to several pin pointed questions related to the recently viral video “My Choice”. The idea behind this survey was to get an idea of people’s approach to feminism.

Results:

We raised certain cutting edge questions along with some other similar questions. The results to these questions are summarized below:

  

What is your idea of feminism?

Option A: Equal political, economic, cultural, and social rights for men and women.

Option B: Women proving their strength by feminist movements.

Option C: Freedom for a woman to do whatever they wish to do within the framework of national law. 

Option A is the Wikipedia definition of feminism while the other two are extream options for psuedo feminist and anti feminist mindsets. Most people went with option A. 

Are feminist movements demonizing men?

The inner circle is for females and the outer is for the males. This shows a sharp contrast in the number of people agreeing. We can clearly see how same quanta of change is perceived by a group which feels power is slipping as completely different to the other which feels they are at gain. 

Who needs feminism the most?

While people say that rural uneducated women are the ones needing a rise in feminism, Vogue is targeting upper middle class women. This looks like a psychological attempt on these upper middle class women to tap the growing Indian market. 

What are your views on the video “My Choice”?

Option A (Blue): The idea behind the movie is good and the message is precise and well delivered.

Option B (Red): The movie is good, but the message delivered is exaggerated and wrong.

Option C (Green): The idea behind the movie is flawed.

Lot more females saw the movie as perfectly alright as compared to males.



How well Feminism is portrayed in movie ‘My Choice’ on a scale of 1 to 10?

The utility of the movie is rated on a increasing level from left to right. 

Many more women are on the right side as compared to men while many more men are on the left. Though most of the people are in the middle section and find the movie partially effective. The psychology behind is the same as discussed before.

Conclusion:

The results of the survey led to various conclusions. While answering the basic question on the definition of feminism, majority voted that feminism aims at equality between men and women. The survey asked if people believed that feminist movements demonize men, to which the answers differed between men and women. It explains how people look at things from different point of views. Some specific questions were asked to people taking the example of the recently viral video 'My Choice', to which answers were mostly same by majority of men and women however some people had opinions on extreme ends. The results can be concluded by saying that male and female are taking the mediums of spreading feminism differently and the movie 'My Choice' is not targeting the people who actually need feminism but is only taping the Indian markets.

References:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism

2. http://www.quora.com/search?q=feminism

Bystander Effect

Team- Gaurav Suman, Dheerendra Kumar Meena, Akshay Verma

Introduction

Wikipedia definition of Bystander effect,"The Bystander effect, or Bystander apathy is a social psychological phenomenon that refers to cases in which individuals do not offer any means of help to a victim when other people are present".[1]

The concept was first demonstrated by two psychology researchers, John Darley and Bibb Latane in laboratory in 1968. They were researching and conducting experiments about the effect, following the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964.[2] This effect is one of the strongest and most replicable psychological phenomenon.

Motivation

In India, there are countless incidents involving a crime/assault in public and which involve local people standing as audience, rather than helping the victim. One such incident is witnessed in Guwahati, in July 2012. A young woman was sexually assaulted in public. From the video footage and eye witness reports, it was cleat that there were many people who were in position of helping the woman but didn't helped.[3]

We chose this topic to educate people about this effect,and to understand the mentality of people about this effect and how one can avoid falling victim to this effect.

Past Studies and surveys

Many aspects of Bystander effect are well researched and these results are backed up by many surveys. As to answer why this effect occurs, some possible causes include– ambiguity, cohesiveness , diffusion of responsibility.

Ambiguity: A person is more likely to help a victim, if he understands the situation quickly. As an example, suppose a person falls from a bicycle, a passerby may overlook him, considering this situation as non-serious. However, if the person who fell from the bicycle is shouting for help, a passerby consider this situation as an emergency may respond fast. Thus a sense of emergency encourages people to help other people.

Cohesiveness: Cohesiveness may be defined as established relationship between people. This relationship may be friendship, acquaintance, etc. According to a survey done by Mark and Simon, in 2008, cohesiveness affects how a person respond to such situations. A high cohesive group of people is more likely to help than a low cohesive group of people.[4]

Diffusion of responsibility: Darley and Latane, conducted research on diffusion of responsibility. The research suggests that, when there are more people around in case of emergency, the people believe that someone else will take responsibility. Thus the sense of responsibility is diffused. This is one of the main cause of Bystander Effect.[5]

Approach:

To understand this effect and mentality of people in such situations, we conducted a survey in our Institute campus. 40 people participated in our survey, out of which 38 were male participants. We conclude the following results from our survey.

Survey results

1. Cohesiveness and membership:

The participants were asked whether they prefer to help a person when they are alone or when they are with their close friends.

Result 1 - Cohesiveness and membership 

The result was inconclusive, as equal number of participants prefer to help when alone and same number of participants prefer to help in group. However, few people change their preference of help when in group.

2. Response in different situations.

The participants were asked whether they prefer to save a person who is getting sexually assaulted and/or physically assaulted and/or robbed.

Result 2 - Response in different situations

As the results show, People are more likely help a sexual assault victim over a physical assault victim. In this result, we see that the less ambiguous the situation, the more likely people are to help. A physically assault can be interpreted wrongly, but robbery and sexual assault are clearly emergency situations.

3. Gender Biasing

Participants were asked about whether they will preferably help a male physical assault victim , the assaulter being a female or a female physical assault victim, assaulter being a male.

Result 3 - Bystander Effect and gender

The result shows that a female victim will be saved preferably over a male victim. In the graph, 12 participants responded that they will bystanders for males only. 5 participants will not help both males and females. No participant wants to be a bystander only for females. However, some responses also include that the participant want to know the reason behind this physical beating.

4. Parental teaching to encourage helping

Finally we asked our participants if they were encouraged to help people by their parents, and whether they will encourage their children to help other people.

Cat 1 - Participants were encouraged to help by their parents.

Cat 2 - Participants will encourage their children to help others.

Result 4 - Parental Teaching for helping others.

The result was favorable that more people want to encourage their children to be a helper than a bystander.

Conclusion:

From our survey and the materials we read, we found that, in general, people are likely to help other people. However, under different circumstances their responses vary from being helpful to being a bystander. Since there were very few females who were part of this survey, so this survey can't give genuine answer about opinions of particular gender about this effect.

Also, this survey was conducted only on students of our Institute, so the results could have been different than the opinion of local people.

For future work on this topic, we would like to work on educating more people about this effect and find possible courses of actions in case of emergencies.

References:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese

[3] http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/07/13/guwahati-shows-we-are-a-nation-of-bystanders/

[4] Mark Levine and Simon Crowther (2008). "The Responsive Bystander: How Social Group, Membership and Group Size can encourage as well as Inhibit Bystander Intervention." Journal of   Personality and Social Psychology.

[5] J.M. Darley and B. Latane (1968), "Bystander Intervention in Emergencies: Diffusion of Responsibility." Journal of   Personality and Social Psychology.

Conformity on Stereotypes and Prejudices

Team - Himanth Nersu, Santhosh A, Satya Abhiram Theli

Introduction:

• Conformity involves changing your behaviors in order to "fit in" or "go along" with the people around you. Examples of conformity are readily observable in almost every activities. A 20-year-old college student drinks at a sorority party because all his friends are doing it and he does not want to be the odd one out. Another example in the corporate world be the office attire. A popular survey conducted in 2011 found that roughly 15 percent of employers plan to relax their dress codes. While some employers are implementing casual work environments, many employers conform to traditional dress codes such as those found in banks, law offices and other professional services firms.
• If your answer to the question "Do whites have a better chance of winning the US elections?" is "Yes", then it is a perfect example of Stereotyping. Stereotypes are assumptions made about a group of people and are applied to individuals irrespective of their personal characteristics because of their affiliation with said group. Stereotypes can be positive, negative, or neutral, but no matter the type, it's important to use extreme caution around stereotypes, especially in the workplace.
• Prejudice is usually referred to as a negative attitude, especially when it is a hatred towards certain kinds of people. Some common examples are: In the United States, black people could not sit in the front of buses or use the same water fountains as white people until the 1950s and 1960s; Assumptions that someone who is physically disabled is also mentally disabled; Reluctance of parents to approve their children marrying anyone of a different religion. 

Motivation:

• Stereotyping and Prejudicing are pretty much similar in their own terms and occur mostly because of social influence.
• In some cases, this social influence might involve agreeing with or acting like the majority of people in a specific group, or it might involve behaving in a particular way in order to be perceived as "normal" by the group.
• This motivated us to the study of effects of conformity on Stereotyping and Prejudicing nature of people.

Approach:

• We did a questionnaire survey on IIT Patna student community to study the effects of conformity.
• The questions revolved around gender/religious/racial profiling. The questions were framed to assess the stereotyping and prejudicing nature of the people who took the survey.
• One set (A) of people were told about previous responses of the same survey. These responses were purposefully framed to make-believe the people of A that a vast majority (or the minority, in few questions) of the people hold negative stereotypes or prejudices.
• Another set (B) of people were asked the questions directly.

Survey Responses:

The analyses in better resolution can be found here.

Conclusion:

• The responses from set B were found to be in accordance with the information about the previous survey.
• More people from set B tend to show stronger stereotyping and prejudicing behavior than set A
• This shows the influence of conformity on peoples’ social behavior.
• A vast percentage of people discriminate only as a result of social influence.
• A possible reason for this can be that people who are high in the desire for control are less likely to conform than people low in the desire for control due to their feeling that they will be relinquishing control over events in their lives if they conform.