Oh dear, nappy changing 'back breaking work', since when? Having changed more than my fair share of nappies, my back is fine.

Another emotive propaganda article.

It certainly looks like our so called higher learning centres are little more than centres of propagande and mis-information.

By the way what ever happened to the vasectomy campaign in India?

"It is overwhelmingly women who carry the bulk of the physical and emotional responsibilities of parenting." - and it's overwhelmingly men who carry the bulk of the physical and emotional responsibilities of providing for and defending women and children.

Thankfully both are changing and the division of responsibility does become more a matter of choice for those involved. The article had too much spin, ignoring the uncomfortable fact's of mens lives for the sake of playing men as the bad guy's and women as the oppressed victims.

I found nappy changing to be stomach churning but not exactly back breaking (regardless of access to a change table of not). Perhaps the author could try some genuinely back breaking work.

If family friendly workplace policies create discrimination against women it will be where they are discriminatory by nature, maternity leave rather than parenting leave etc.

Old hat stir up the troops spin trying to perpetuate a gender war that we should be putting behind us. It's not all perfect but shallow self serving articles like this have been doen to death, time to start thinking about the social structures that impact on both genders and how we can fix themk for everyone.

R0bert

Notwithstanding that women in third world countries face challenges that most Western women couldn't even contemplate, to describe nappy changing, feeding and bathing as "backbreaking" was perhaps imprudent.
And why would anyone be surprised that men in India would assume that it is women's work = traditionally it is women's work. That doesn't mean that men won't or can't do it, but it stands to reason that the female of the species usually tend the infants - hello?

Where in the Western paradigm is it demonstrated that women are "fulfilled" and "emancipated" by fashioning a situation where they are forced to "juggle" their paid work responsibilities and their child rearing?

Fulfillment for women the world over is more likely to flourish if both genders learn to acknowledge and value women's maternal maternal and nurturing role - not to relegate it to mere drudgery or collateral status.

There has been a problem with pharmaceutical fraud, that the active compound is either non-existant or below the stated concentration, this has lead to a few deaths.

It is my understanding, that countries looking for cheap medications get some of those supplies from India.

Pharmaceutical manufacturing companies where women are the head, have been involved in this fraud.

On the other side, in India it really doesn't matter what gender you are, if you are poor, affording health care is well and truly out of your reach.

It would seem that the really privileged feminists of the first world, have to look outside to the third world countries to find justification for feminism.

Thus there is what is known as cultural conflict and religious conflict as well. But this is conveviently ignored.

Of the comments, Poirot's take comes closest to my own, as others also commented the thread starter scratches the surface, but then shys away from an examination of the context and pre conditions that create the current global disaster as to poverty alleviation for the masses, against the imperatives of global capitalism and its military tinpot satraps in control of poor countries, instead opting for line of least resistance by way of a general grumble about "men".
It will take a lot more than a bit more changing of nappies, like their women folk and kids, men are scrambling for survival in the worst of these places also.
Try some thing like the scheme they introduced in Bangladesh, then parts of Africa, where they developed finance for poor women trying for economic self sufficiency. Thus, the change in attitude point is valid and the start of a new approach.
As current ecological policy "ignores the science", so global poverty alleviation ignores need before greed.
As a side efect, poverty reinforces the conservatism of near feudal peasant societies living in grinding poverty. Some thing like the events in Egypt recently, a mass eruption of social consciousness could the way forward.
But look what happened with Egypt.
The Americans and Israelis combined to thwart the democratic impulse because it didn't suit their narrow tastes that Egypt move to democracy.

If, in order to achieve equality, women need a whole raft of laws, policies, and penalties operating unequally in their favour, obviously the sexes are not equal.

Women don’t have babies as a matter of gender, they have them as a matter of sex.

All we are witnessing in this article is the special pleading of vested interests in a double standard, backed by force, by which it is hoped women will have the advantages without the disadvantages of patriarchy, and men will have the liabilities both ways.

The grand furphy on which this article is based, is the assumption that men and women have an equal responsibility for the care of any given child. They don’t. Of course *women* think men should decide more in their favour. “They would say that, wouldn’t they?” But it’s no less an arbitrary social construct, no less an abuse of power, than saying we should have laws for the sake of equal opportunity to promote women’s equal “responsibility” for casual no-strings-attached sex.