Girls are weighed down by restrictions, boys with demands, two equally harmful disciplines.

Two Cages, One Lock

In a small town house, two children get ready for school. Meera, fourteen, is reminded to be home before dark, to keep her laughter low and to stop asking about the science camp in the city, because "girls do not travel alone". Her brother Arjun, sixteen, is told something different every evening: he must top the coaching test, he must not cry over a failed exam, and one day he must support the whole family. Nobody in that house intends harm. Each instruction is offered as care. Yet the girl learns to shrink, and the boy learns that his worth is a number he must keep producing. Girls are disciplined by what they are forbidden to do, boys by what they are required to become, and both disciplines, by trading a whole human being for a role, damage the children they claim to protect.

The root of both lies in the idea that gender is learnt rather than given. Simone de Beauvoir observed that "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman", and the same is true of becoming a man. Through socialisation, the family, school and community hand each child a script. For girls the script is negative, a list of walls: what to wear, where to go, whom to meet, when to marry. For boys it is positive in grammar but no less coercive: earn, protect, win, endure. Sociologists describe this as the gendered division of roles, in which care and modesty are assigned to one sex and provision and power to the other. Restriction and demand look like opposites, but they are two halves of a single design, and that design is patriarchy.

The restrictions on girls are visible in hard numbers. The sex ratio at birth of 929 girls for every 1,000 boys recorded by NFHS-5 (2019-21) shows that the first restriction is on being born at all. Those who are born carry a heavier load at home: the Time Use Survey of 2019 found that women spent about 299 minutes a day on unpaid domestic work against 97 minutes for men. Curbs on mobility follow a girl into adolescence, often justified as safety, and they quietly shape her schooling, her choice of subjects and her chance of paid work. Even with recent gains, female labour force participation stood at about 41.7% in PLFS 2023-24, far below that of men. Every closed door narrows not only her world but also her sense of what she deserves.

The demands on boys are less visible because they wear the costume of privilege. A boy hears early that "mard ko dard nahi hota", that a real man feels no pain. He is pushed towards particular careers, measured by marks and later by salary, and denied the language of fear or sadness. The cost appears in quieter statistics. According to the National Crime Records Bureau's report for 2022, over seven in ten people who died by suicide in India were men, and the deaths of coaching students in Kota have become a national grief. This emotional suppression and the burden of being the sole provider rarely enter debates on gender. The feminist writer bell hooks named the problem precisely:

"The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation."

Yet the claim that the two disciplines are equally harmful deserves scrutiny. A boy weighed down by expectations still inherits property, voice and freedom of movement; a girl weighed down by restrictions may lose her schooling, her choice of partner and, in the worst cases, her life through dowry violence or so-called honour crimes. The harms are not identical in kind or in scale, and to pretend otherwise would trivialise the structural disadvantage women face. But equal harm need not mean identical harm: one discipline denies freedom, the other denies wholeness, and each produces the other. It is in this deeper sense that the two are equal, because neither child is allowed to be fully human.

The two disciplines are locked together. The boy told that he must be the protector is soon appointed the guardian of his sister's honour, and the demand on him becomes the restriction on her. The young man trained to measure himself by earning faces a crisis when work does not come, and frustrated masculinity often turns into control over women at home or harassment on the street. The family that will not let a daughter work forces a son to carry the entire income alone. Dowry itself joins the two disciplines in one transaction: the daughter is treated as a burden, the son as an asset whose price must be paid. Breaking one chain without the other only shifts the weight, which is why gender justice cannot be a project for girls alone.

The costs spill beyond the family into the nation. When half the population is kept away from paid work, the economy loses talent it has already educated; the McKinsey Global Institute estimated in 2015 that advancing women's equality could add about $700 billion to India's GDP by 2025. When men are pressed into a single model of success, society loses artists, carers and teachers who were told those paths were unmanly. Both disciplines also shape public life. A politics that sees women as wards and men as warriors produces policies of protection rather than empowerment and leaves little room for care as a public value. Articles 14 and 15 promise equality before the law, but a constitution cannot work against habits learnt at every dinner table.

Change is already visible where both sides of the problem are addressed. Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, launched in 2015, made the girl child's survival and schooling a public campaign. Government schools in Kerala, beginning with one at Valayanchirangara, have adopted gender-neutral uniforms, a small sign that schools can unlearn the dress codes of restriction. Mental health services such as Tele-MANAS, launched in 2022, give young men a place to speak of distress without shame. Sweden reserves months of paid parental leave for each parent, so that care becomes ordinary work for fathers as well. In Haryana, the Phogat sisters, trained as wrestlers by their father, showed that a family can lift restrictions and still be proud. These efforts work best when they treat gender norms, not girls or boys, as the problem.

The deepest remedy lies in the home and in culture. Indian tradition offers the image of Ardhanarishvara, Shiva and Shakti in one body, a reminder that strength and tenderness belong to every person. Parents who let sons cry and daughters travel teach more than any campaign. Schools can teach consent, emotional literacy and shared housework as seriously as mathematics. Media can show fathers cooking and mothers leading companies without making either a joke. Dr B.R. Ambedkar measured "the progress of a community by the degree of progress which women have achieved", and that progress is impossible while men remain trapped in roles that make them guards of a cage they themselves cannot leave.

Return to that small town house. Imagine Meera boarding the bus to the science camp, and Arjun telling his father that he failed the test and is frightened, and being held rather than scolded. Nothing has been taken from either; both have been given back a part of themselves. Restriction and demand are not opposite fates but the same lesson taught in two voices, that a child must fit a mould before being allowed to be a person. A society that frees its daughters from walls and its sons from weights does not lose order. It gains citizens who are free, secure and whole, and only such citizens can build a just and genuinely developed India.