Panel Discussion on Gender

Francis Bacon once famously said, “Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man”

Pure academia sees to the strategies of reading and writing. And Panel discussions and conferences help all round development. For this particular session, the topic of Gender was given to the panellists: Shreya Murali and Kasturi Chatterjee from EPS, Raeshmi R. and Aswathi S. from PSEco and Rachna Baruah and Priyanka Chakrabarty from PSEng.

Gender… That one word is impregnated with enormous amount of information. It draws on History, Biology, Psychology, and most of all, Sociology. The concepts of gender and sex are increasingly becoming multilinear, touching and influencing several aspects of a person’s life.

Some of these aspects were discussed through a Panel Discussion that took place among the students of Sociology. The chief themes discussed were Gender Identity and Consumer Behaviour and their usage in advertisements; Portrayal of Gender in Media; Discrimination against women and the LGBT community; and Feminism and Western Philosophy related to this domain. Indeed, this panel discussion went well beyond the common goal of gender sensitization which such discussions often have.

With these sub-topics, the panellists covered the past and present of the concept and relevance of gender and attempted to foresee its future: perhaps, as Marx viewed a classless society on the horizon, we could, as one of the panellists remarked, hope to transform into a gender creative society.