Question

The Supreme Court of India noted that it is a prevalent gender stereotype that women officers find it challenging to meet the hazards of service owing to their prolonged absence during pregnancy, motherhood and domestic obligations towards their children and families, as the notion assumes that domestic obligations rest solely on women. Reliance on the ‘inherent physiological differences between men and women’ rests in a deeply entrenched stereotypical and constitutionally flawed notion that women are the ‘weaker’ sex and may not undertake tasks that are ‘too arduous’ for them. Arguments founded on the physical strengths and weaknesses of men and women and on assumptions about women in the social context of marriage and family do not constitute a constitutionally valid basis for denying equal opportunity to women officers. To deny the grant of permanent commission to women officers on the ground that this would upset the ‘peculiar dynamics’ in a unit casts an undue burden on women officers which has been claimed as a ground for excluding women. If society holds strong beliefs about gender roles, that men are socially dominant, physically powerful and the breadwinners of the family and that women are weak and physically submissive, and primarily caretakers confined to a domestic atmosphere, it is unlikely that there would be a change in mindsets