Gender Blindness in the Classroom—and in the Chair of Power

A math problem. A lunch-table question. A moment that exposed how deeply gender stereotypes survive—even in higher education. This reflection examines how gender blindness, institutional power, and misplaced ideas of “strength” quietly undermine feminist ethics.

When Gender Sensitisation Meets Gender Blindness

This reflection emerges from my engagement with the academic community—not as an abstract theorist, but as the Director of the Centre for Women’s Studies, working at the uneasy intersection of policy, pedagogy, and lived experience. I was asked to curate a short-term Gender Sensitisation Programme for faculty members from Arts and Science colleges. What unfolded during that week was both revealing and unsettling.

During one session, a resource person cited a seemingly innocuous example from a school mathematics textbook: Ravi buys five spinning tops; Maya buys eight bangles. The point was straightforward—how early educational materials naturalise gender roles by quietly aligning boys with play and movement, and girls with adornment and domesticity. These are not neutral choices; they are ideological cues, embedded precisely at an age when children are learning how to imagine themselves and others.

The session ended. Lunch break began. And that was when a woman participant—herself a teacher in higher education—asked me, quite sincerely:
“Why should it matter at all if Ravi bought spinning tops and Maya bought bangles?”

I was momentarily stunned—not merely by the question, but by what it revealed. This was not ignorance; it was something more troubling. It was gender blindness masquerading as common sense. The inability—or refusal—to recognise how power works through repetition, symbolism, and everyday narratives. When educators fail to detect ideology in pedagogy, they don’t stand outside patriarchy; they become its spokespersons.

This moment confirmed a discomforting truth: elucidated feminist concepts do not automatically translate into feminist sensibilities. Education, even in the Humanities, does not inoculate one against uncritical or apolitical thinking.

Power, Gender, and the Myth of the “Strong Woman”

This blindness is not confined to classrooms. Over the years, I have encountered another deeply troubling phenomenon: women in administrative positions who exhibit startling insensitivity towards other women—particularly working mothers caring for infants.

Power, it seems, does not merely masculinise; it often erases memory.

Some women administrators speak of their own past struggles with a peculiar pride—“I never compromised at work, even when I had a small baby”—as though endurance were a moral badge and suffering a benchmark for legitimacy. This narrative transforms personal survival into a disciplinary standard. It leaves no room for difference, vulnerability, or structural critique.

What troubles me most is not the claim itself, but the arrogance it produces—the assumption that one woman’s capacity should become the universal measure for all women. This logic is not feminist; it is neoliberal. It celebrates individual resilience while erasing unequal bodies, uneven support systems, mental health realities, and the politics of care.

The irony deepens when such remarks come from women trained in the Humanities—disciplines that, at least in theory, cultivate empathy, historicity, and attentiveness to social location. When the Humanities lose their ethical core, they risk becoming hollow performances of progressive language.

Selective Solidarities

Perhaps the most paradoxical aspect of this saga is that many of these women are vocal advocates of reservation, inclusion, and social justice. They speak eloquently of intersectionality, tolerance, and structural disadvantage. Yet, when confronted with the everyday struggles of women closest to them—junior colleagues, working mothers, caregivers—their solidarity collapses.

Why does situatedness matter only when it is abstract?

If all bodies responded to stress in identical ways, we would not be witnessing a global mental health crisis. Strength is not universal, and resilience is not endlessly renewable. One woman’s capacity to “manage it all” does not invalidate another woman’s exhaustion. Feminism does not demand sameness; it demands care.

Let us be clear: your strength does not give you moral authority over another woman’s limits. Nor does it grant you permission to dismiss her concerns.

An Uncomfortable Admission

I say this with no desire to romanticise men or absolve patriarchy: in my own professional experience, I have often found male colleagues to be more empathetic and accommodating towards women’s caregiving responsibilities than some women in power. This is not an endorsement of men; it is an indictment of a feminism emptied of reflexivity.

When women reproduce the very hierarchies feminism sought to dismantle, the problem is not individual failure—it is political amnesia.

Gender sensitisation, then, cannot remain a checklist exercise or a token programme. It must be an ongoing ethical practice—one that interrogates not only textbooks and policies, but also ourselves. Otherwise, we risk producing institutions that speak the language of equality while quietly rehearsing its negation.

And that, perhaps, is the most dangerous form of sexism of all—one that wears a progressive face while remaining structurally cruel.