Three things I’ve learned about the real meaning of gender equality

When I started the Red Elephant Foundation in 2013, six months after I turned 25, I was still wet behind the ears about gender equality. Growing up in Chennai, India I lived through a mix of bullying, racism and abuse as a child and a teen which I was sure would not have happened had the world been gender equal.

Here are three things I’ve learned about gender equality since then.

1 | It’s not just about women and men
When I was younger I ignorantly believed an oversimplified version of gender equality: that men and women were all that constituted gender. Slowly I’ve realised that gender and the fight for gender equality is not binary.

It started with a conversation with a high schooler who identified as gay. He told me that in his younger years, he was bullied for not conforming to what a boy was supposed to be. He was sexually abused and taunted for his sexual orientation when he came out at the beginning of high school. I realised that gender is not water tight and that those who identify as male are also vulnerable to abuse and gendered oppression – particularly when there are other elements to their identity that put them outside the so-called norm.

In India most of the forms I fill out use sex and gender interchangeably. I assumed the two to be the same thing. There was never dialogue about what the two terms actually meant. I was aware of the hijra transgender community in India as I was growing up, but they have been ostracised from society and portrayed as comic relief and caricatures in films and TV. The “third gender” as it was known, was presented as an aberration.

I’ve learned that neither gender nor sex is binary. One can be born with male, female or intersex anatomy. Gender, a social construct that has nothing to do with sex, is fundamentally about what one chooses to identify as. Being a spectrum, gender is far beyond the binary – male, female, transgender binary, transgender non-binary, agender, genderfluid, genderqueer, gender questioning and so on. Tinder lists 37 gender options for its users to choose from.2 | The true meaning of equality is ...
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My first understanding of equality started with a history text in high school. It was the rose-tinted version of absolute equality. I was living in an idealistic bubble until I started volunteering when I was 17.

I was in a classroom, helping teach young men and women from different backgrounds. Though they were all capable and working hard at their studies, their different backgrounds had an impact on their success. Some could afford to pay private tutors to help with their education. Some studied under streetlights for want of electricity at home. In some families, a choice was made between sons and daughters when it came to paying for education, sons won.

That made me realise that people do not have the same starting line, the same resources, capabilities, talents and characteristics as each other. We can’t assume that there is a level playing ground. What we can offer, instead, is equality in the way we treat people. I came to understand the true meaning of equality: equality of opportunity, of treatment, of status and the freedom of choice.

3 | Gender discrimination doesn’t exist in a vacuum
I used to look at gender as an independent identity. Now I’ve realised, through the global conversation on intersectionality, that gender equality needs to be considered in the context of other inequalities and identities.

During a conversation with a woman who visited our house each morning to help with the cleaning, I realised how many identities come together to compound the impact of gender inequality. We were both 25 at the time. But she was married, had three children, and was forced out of school because her community required that she be married off by a certain age.

 Kirthi Jayakumar, founder and CEO of the Red Elephant Foundation
 Kirthi Jayakumar, founder and CEO of the Red Elephant Foundation. Photograph: Kirthi Jayakumar
Following that conversation, I began to understand the many elements at play in one’s identity. Copious reading then made me see that these other identities include race, colour, caste, challenges to sexuality and sexual identities, disability, religious practices, harmful practices rooted in certain cultures, economic challenges and such. Intersectionality helps understand how a gendered oppression plays out in a given context.

There are documented studies on how women of colour and economically disadvantaged women are more vulnerable to violence, that women of certain religious groups are more likely to face oppression. It is also true, that lesbian and bisexual women are more vulnerable to hate-based violence and trans women are either ignored in the rhetoric, or are murdered in hate crimes.

In order to understand intersectionality, we must understand privilege. Privilege insulates some women from facing certain challenges. In not accounting for intersectionality in feminism, we are in danger belittling the experiences of women who are at greater comparative risk, and, also risk fragmenting the movement.



We cannot make any progress in gender equality, however marginal, unless our work is inclusive and acknowledges the wider rhetoric of gender fluidity.

I’ve realised that you can work in the domain of gender equality for years and still have a lot to learn. The evolving nature of personal identity and the way that clashes with old and rigid ideas always presents challenges. And so, as much as you learn along the way, it also takes some un-learning to keep the process alive and real. Flexibility is essential to making gains.