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A recent US study shows young women in urban areas, and especially New York city, earning more than their male counterparts. One is not surprised. When more urban women are graduates than men, when they are marrying less and having fewer or no children, they will obviously do better. Equally, if more men are willing to share household chores and play homemakers, their careers will take some knocks.

In India, the opposite is the case. Despite the widely-acknowledged fact that girls are doing better than boys at school and beyond, there is no evidence that salary tables have been turned. Not only that, an Assocham study shows working women to be twice as stressed. They not only have to do their office jobs competently, but also have to meet great expectations back home — whether it is cooking, children or taking care of the aged.

The reason for the contrast is obvious. The developed west — more northern Europe than the US, of course — has moved beyond basic issues of equality and empowerment. We are only now beginning to acknowledge them. On the contrary, on all critical dimensions of women’s status and empowerment, we seem to be visibly sliding. Incidents of rape, sexual harassment, female foeticide and general discrimination seem to be only multiplying. What’s going wrong here? My counter-intuitive answer is this: the missing ingredient is not inadequate attention to the needs of girl and women, but a complete lack of understanding of what boys need to develop into decent men. We don’t know what’s happening to boys when they are growing up, and we don’t seem to care how they are brought up. Many grow up to be wife-beating, abusive and alcoholic men.

As a society, nobody has any doubt what needs to be done for women: give them encouragement, good role models, equal opportunities, a supportive legal framework, and they’ll do well. In large parts of urban India, and especially in modern workplaces like IT and BPO companies, media and television, the financial sector and service industries, women are doing very well. Things are far from perfect, but the trajectory is clear and unchangeable. Women know what they want. They are on their way.

Men, on the other hand, have lost their way. Faced with competition in the workplace, challenges to their traditional roles, and negative media images of them, they are thrashing about for direction. The women they are married to, or the mothers they are born to, don’t know how to bring up boys — at least, many don’t — in an age where gender roles are changing dramatically. As for dads, they have abdicated their responsibilities, finding refuge in office and work.

Men need help, and they don’t know it. I have not seen or read about any major initiative focusing on the needs of boys. One is not talking about special advantages, which they already have, but about creating an environment where they can flower. Personally, I would focus on social research, policy, workplace education and schools. At the national level, we need to fund research on how boys are actually brought up by various communities in different regions.

Best practices need to be identified and disseminated, bad practices dumped. At the level of policy, strategies to help girl children must be mirrored for boys, though with different handling. While for female empowerment you only need to remove obstacles and offer encouragement, in the case of boys, the issues are more complex. Boys face no obvious discrimination, but as the world moves away from stereotypical gender roles, they need support and to be comfortable with themselves even while learning to respect the other sex. This needs education, gender sensitisation, training, role modelling. which unfortunately, we have very little of.

It is fashionable to think that the world will be a better place once women are emancipated, but this is short-sighted. I don’t see how women can benefit when boys are growing into ruffians, bullies or sissies. A genuinely equal world needs to think as much about developing healthy attitudes amongst both boys and girls. Pretending that only one sex needs encouragement is worse than burying your head in sand. We are destroying the futures of all our children with this attitude.

Email: r_jagannathan@dnaindia.net