Equality in the syllabus: Where students learn gender parity, human rights and more

“You are a young female lawyer; you should focus on yourself, earn more money and give it to charity if you want to make a difference to the society,” this is what 27-year-old human rights lawyer, Gulika Reddy, who hails from Chennai was told when she tried to point at the gender insensitivity that was prevailing in courtrooms. Gulika decided she was going to have it no other way than to change the perspective of society towards looking at things. So she went back to school to achieve this!

“I have always wanted to become a lawyer so I could make a difference, and when I became one I realised that the way the judiciary was looking at cases related to gender was very flawed. I heard some lawyers advise a woman, who had reported a case of abuse in her marriage, to give a rose on Valentine’s Day to the husband, and make peace with him. I also heard insensitive remarks made while dealing with cases of rape victims and sex workers. There could be nothing more insensitive than a lawyer not taking abuse seriously. When I tried to challenge such attitudes, I realised it was deep rooted in the society, with the judiciary only being a representative of society,” Gulika tells DC from Cambridge, where she currently is a Dubin Fellow at the highly reputed Harvard Kennedy School.

So, Gulika decided to start ‘Schools of Equality’, a place where the young from classes 1 to 12 are taught gender parity, human rights and equality; not through lectures but through interactive presentations, theatre and art — all this in addition to mainstream education.

“I spent all my childhood in Chennai growing up in a liberal family. My father is from Andhra Pradesh while my mother is a North Indian and they got married at a time when inter-cultural marriages were still taboo. I could not find the progressive liberal minds in judicial or public spaces that I could in my own family. The judicial space has very few women, and is highly patriarchal.

This is what led me on this journey, to address discrimination faced by people of different genders, of various castes, and religions,” Gulika reveals. She now spends her time between India and the US, as her school has made its presence felt in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka.

“The process of discrimination starts at a scarily young age among humans. We see young children —not even two years of age — thinking it is not normal for men to be in the kitchen or for women to not be in the kitchen. We want a thought process to start from a very young age and to take what is represented of genders in movies or advertisements with a pinch of salt,” she says.

Gulika, who was also a fellow at the Columbia Law Schools, hopes to be able to influence Indian national education policies in future and have equality and social justice be taught compulsorily in all schools. She says it’s a matter of pride for her that some of her school students have managed to help other women or men from abuse or harassment.

“We live in an age where women are still blamed for a rape, or women are told learning self defense is the only way to live comfortably in the city,” she says, adding that even men’s abuse is not taken seriously.