More About NOVA and Uttar Pradesh

In Human Geo today we discussed the two people's loans they made to Kiva, and so far our class are winning with that whole extra credit point class thing. We continued watching the video today too, and it just got worse and worse. Over in Uttar Pradesh, women are basically considered an "economic downer". Like we learned yesterday, when women get married they are then given over to her husbands family to help with her in-laws, abandoning her parents. And if getting a wife wasn't enough for the man, the wife's family would give him a dowery, which is an extra type of "gift" to make it seem like the wife was more valuable and more worth marrying. Examples would be 4 cows and 2 goats, or a few chickens. And since having a boy rather than a daughter over there is so important to their culture, some husbands or in-laws would actually burn or poison the wives, killing or hospitalizing them, just because they gave birth to a boy. What makes it even more sad is that it's common, and not too much of a surprise to many people over there, AND the people that did the burning don't even get charged with crime or put in jail, because "she didn't have a boy" is a good enough excuse. *I don't really understand why they don't realize that the male chromosome plays a part in determining the child's gender.* Many babies are aborted or killed if they end up being female, and this whole part in their culture causes there to be 35 million fewer women than men, and a 7% difference in the ratio between men and women. We talked about ways for women to have a higher place in the ladder of power, because just telling the men, who are the highest in power over there, that it's the "right thing to do" won't do much, because they may just think "what's in it for me?". We thought of allowing women to have job opportunities, and get an education, so they are noticed as being more useful than just being able to give birth. We could also allow them to have connections to the outside world, to realize that this kind of discrimination doesn't exist everywhere, and that they do have a chance.