The intersection between gender and the digital world is an interesting and fruitful one. In recent years, gender equality has got a huge boost partly because of the many conversations that have been kickstarted in online spaces around gender issues. These conversations have encouraged many everyday feminists, who may not have had the opportunity to speak up in real-life environments, to talk about things that impact women the world over: from sexism in workplaces (even extremely regressive ones) and on social media, to normalising conversations about women’s bodies and bodily functions like menstruation.
At FactorDaily as well, we made a conscious choice to talk about gender issues through stories and opinion pieces that reveal the casual, unconscious sexism in our society. Here are some of these stories:
1. Women don’t want to go to startup events to know more about how other women manage homes and children. Managing homes and children isn’t just a woman’s job, you know?
Why are female entrepreneurship events always such weep-fests?
2. One of India’s first feminist writers (and a science fiction nerd to boot), Begum Rokeya Hossain kicked ass 100 years ago.
A Splendid Revenge: A badass Bengali feminist from 116 years ago, and a land without women
3. Agents of Ishq — an online platform that talks about sexuality through real-life stories of men and women discovering, enjoying and letting go of love, sex and desire.
4. Fed up of Uncleji sending jokes about nagging wives and henpecked husbands? Tell him.
Uncleji, please stop sending sexist jokes on WhatsApp and take your Men’s Rights Activism elsewhere
5. Grindr users we spoke to described the app as a “lifeline” and “the ultimate thing”, but they also pointed out that it has a dark underbelly if you’re not careful.
Inside Grindr: Indian users spill the good, bad, and ugly secrets of the gay hookup app
6. Khabar Lahariya covers local issues that are ignored by mainstream publications, and is written, edited, produced, and distributed exclusively by a few dozen women
India’s only all-woman rural newspaper has a new challenge: cracking digital publishing
7. Do Facebook and Instagram think women’s breasts are obscene or something? Really?
Yet another artist’s work taken down: Why do FB, Instagram have a problem with women’s bodies?
8. Women are severely under-represented in the world’s biggest crowdsourced encyclopaedia. How can we change this?
Changing Wikipedia’s (and society’s) male bias is work in progress
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Lead visual: Nikhil Raj Disclosure: FactorDaily is owned by SourceCode Media, which counts Accel Partners, Blume Ventures and Vijay Shekhar Sharma among its investors. Accel Partners is an early investor in Flipkart. Vijay Shekhar Sharma is the founder of Paytm. None of FactorDaily’s investors have any influence on its reporting about India’s technology and startup ecosystem.
