Religion Inc.
NILANJANA S. ROY
Imagine a worldwide corporation with thousands of staffers and millions of
shareholders that had failed to update its policies on gender equality,
women’s rights and equal opportunity hiring for the last five centuries.
Imagine that despite growing rumbles from many members, this corporation
continued with its policies. Its security stems from knowing that the
nearest competitors — two equally large companies with venerable lineages
and great power — pursue the same discriminatory policies and have done so
for years.
Of the two other companies, one allows women to be employees under certain
circumstances, but prefers that its executives keep their wives at home for
the most part. One is fighting a battle to prevent women from occupying
senior management positions, and while the company has been on the losing
side, some branches have made up for the losses by making women into
corporate targets. Several smaller corporations in the same line of business
are similarly blind to the needs, rights and wants of half their employee
and shareholder base. But neither the three big corporations nor the smaller
ones are ever put through an audit or a legal investigation.
No Fortune 500 company, however powerful, would get away for very long with
following these policies. Most real-world corporations have been forced to
dent the glass ceiling if not break through it; the ones that don’t have
been challenged and often dragged to court. They may not have equality, but
they do have a commitment to it.
No modern-day government, either, could get away with policies that
deliberately discriminated against or excluded or persecuted half the
population without being declared a rogue state. The ones that do are dogged
by human rights organisations, questioned by international bodies, often
slapped with trade restrictions, and reminded by economists that gender
discrimination is expensive for a country.
It’s like corporate charity: studies have found that there’s a correlation
between how well companies do and how much they give back to society.
Similarly, many countries have found that there is a direct equation between
how well they do in economic terms and how well they treat women citizens.
Countries that continue to discriminate against women seem to end up on the
low end of the economic totem pole.
The only organisations that thrive on gender discrimination are religious
organisations — Islam, Christianity and Hinduism, to name the big three.
Hinduism pays lip service to the idea of woman as deity while incorporating
discrimination against women into many practices. Islam is fighting a
pitched battle against women in the fold who are now demanding the right to
pray alongside the men and to be accepted as maulvis. And Christianity has
just elected, as its new Pope, a man who wrote an infamous letter in 2004
where he decried the “damage” feminism had done the church and reaffirmed
the historical subordination of women.
Half of the membership of any religion is roughly composed of women. If they
got their act together, they could pull off the world’s largest, and most
overdue, shareholder revolt.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050424/asp/look/story_4648539.asp