Towards a Social Paradigm Shift

A big hindrance for women to live a healthy and fulfilling life is often due to the power relations within the society that primarily stems from traditional school of thoughts and operate at all levels of society. Therefore, it is not only important to introduce and implement laws that protect and support women empowerment and promote gender equality, but it is more important to bring about fundamental shift in people’s thinking and beliefs so that women are empowered and gender-equality is realized through a collective social effort, rather than through forced legislations which would render women empowerment and gender equality spurious. It took decades to supplant the value systems of patriarchy with the attributes of empowerment and uncover several fissures in our societal structure. We are aware of this fact that the empowerment process will not occur overnight and we must acknowledge the little success that we have attained so far. Despite of having abundant legal machinery which tends to illustrate number of legislations to protect women’s right, there is a huge gulf between the enactment and enforcement of such laws. Women are still subjected to the same atrocities and injustices. Due to the underlying nuances of the male dominant structure, women in general face restrictions in terms of mobility, access to proper healthcare and education, limited decision-making authority and are more susceptible to violence, curtailing the effectiveness of these policies. The rationale behind this paper is to highlight the vulnerable and disadvantageous position of women in the society and it strongly suggests that the government must work incredibly hard to reform women's current position and attain gender equality, which will have a positive spillover impact on the country's sustainable growth