Here is why Affirmative Actions are needed in our society:

There are several of my friends both — guys and girls who are anti-feminists but still believe in equality, and they do not come to the terms believing that feminism is nothing but equality. I was always introduced to this subject called — Gender and Development in my graduation and post-graduation being a student of Development Communication and Extension. I am glad for getting the opportunity of studying this subject as the subject quite convinced me that almost every woman in the world is getting oppressed. They are oppressed so vigilantly that they are not even able to identify their oppression because that how deep rooted patriarchy in the world is.

I became a feminist because I studied gender, understood feminism and learning each day about it. But this isn’t the case with my friends who label themselves as equalists, because they have not read about it. Patriarchy has been able to normalize the oppression and some of the patriarchs are still able to stand out and bring this concept of equalists because they don’t want the victims to realize that they are being oppressed, because Patriarchy is all about holding power. They want to foster the already existing power dichotomy around the world.

An equalist and feminist are two different levels of a system, since equity is the way to equality. So the women who say I don’t want reservation in a bus or a separate coach in metro is because they are privileged and what they are failing to understand is that everyone is not as privileged as they are. Providing reservation to the weaker section is referred as affirmative action which by the way is a medium to establish equality and equally distribute the power and break the existing power-dichotomy in our society. For example, to say there are still many women present in the different suburbs of our country, India who can not afford traveling and making the reservations in the buses and metros enable them to explore more opportunities around them. Building their skills and capacity is the first step towards breaking the vicious cycle of power dichotomy.

In my view, the Equalist approach is a step ahead than the feminist approach. The end goals of both the approaches are same but one is a medium to reach another. The feminist- approach asks for the affirmative actions in order to bring equality and there by establishing an equalist approach in our society. To bring and establish more empathy in the equalists we need to introduce gender as a compulsory subject in the education system. We need to sensitize our youth despite of which gender they belong so that they understand the importance of — why even someone is getting any reservation? Rather than just snapping at someone who is using reservation.