No Country For Women: Experts debate women safety

Margret Thatcher, the first woman to govern the United Kingdom, once said "if you want something said, ask a man, if you want something done, ask a woman." However this is easier said than done. Report after report and survey after survey point to the ugly truth that gender equality is still some distance away.

A recent report by the World Economic Forum (WEF) showed that 10-year progress made towards gender parity came to a grinding halt last year. India is now ranked below countries like Bangladesh, China, and Maldives when it comes to gender equality.

Apart from facing discrimination at the workplace, women are harassed on the streets and online. A survey by charity Actionaid showed that 80 percent of Indian women face public harassment; that is four out of every five women in the country.

Online abuse is equally pervasive; one in every two women living in Indian cities suffer abuse and harassment online according to a latest survey.

A latest survey by Truecaller shows that 78 percent of women receive blank phone calls with sexual content, another 82 percent receive unsolicited videos and pictures with sexual content. 11 percent of these calls are made by stalker and only 3 percent of these calls are from a person known to them.

So how do women cope with this? Only 10 percent of women file a police complaint against their harassers, 7 percent resort to naming and shaming the spammer on social media.

The women who on work on farms, land for them is not just an asset but an opportunity to build a life for themselves and their family. However, the reality is not so pleasing to the eye. Women make one third of the entire farm workforce, but less than 10 percent of them own that land. Rest of them are either salaried labour or part of the household who owns the land.

However, the law suggests otherwise. In a historic decision last year, the Supreme Court made it mandatory to give equal rights to women in terms of inheritance. However, Allahabad High Court ruled that agricultural land rights are a state subject which leaves women and their land rights in a grey area.

In an interview to CNBC-TV18, Alan Mamedi, Co-founder & CEO of Truecaller, and Swati Chaturvedi, Author and Senior Journalist at The Wire spoke about ways to tackle online and mobile harassment faced by women and Sathya Raghu, Co-Founder & President of Kheyti spoke about the vulnerability of women in the agri sector and their right to equal inheritance.