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-   -   MH to get 20% public parking spaces reserved for women (https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/indian-car-scene/260480-mh-get-20-public-parking-spaces-reserved-women.html)

I wasn't aware, public parking spaces cause gender based "inconvenience".
I wish instead of this, they implemented parking slots for the physically disabled and slots for eVehicles and provide chargers.

Politics 1
Common sense 0
Jai Ho!


Source: https://twitter.com/ANI/status/1605738298290249729

And how do they propose to enforce this? What if the female driver is carrying male pax? What about the other way round? What is the inconvenience here really?

Many countries around the world have similar policies. It is indeed gender based. Unfortunately the gender causing it, are men. Women often feel unsafe and are being harassed by men in parking places.

In many parking garages here, women reserved slots are near the exit so women don’t have to walk to far to get in and out of the often poorly lit, parking garage.

Whilst I agree there should be physical disabled slots too, 50% of the world population is female.

Jeroen

The intention is ostensibly noble but given the acute shortage of parking slots in all the high car ownership town's that dot the Mumbai-Pune belt this seems a political move more than anything else. This will once again become a law, often seen in India, that cannot practically be implemented.

There is no doubt that women in India need all the support, opportunities and facilities we can give them but when you carry the gender flag too far you end up antagonizing the very segments of population {men} whose support is needed.

Interesting to read this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_parking_space

We keep harping about gender equality and yet we keep discriminating.

Oh well, does not really bother me anyway.

In MH, public parking almost always means kerbside. Though malls and movie theaters do have garage style parking spaces, those are, by definition, private and not public places.

These policies have nothing to do with actual women-empowerment. World-over, since religious discrimination isn't helping politicians anymore, they seem to have found shelter in gender-based partisan politics. This is because they see women can be divided into a separate voter-base.

People are blindly buying into these stunts as women-empowerment, instead these are actually policies of women appeasement. This is why companies (& even in Bollywood movies) are actively running PR campaigns that further propagate this agenda, often with made-up statistics.

All is fine until it comes to the extreme detriment of other meritorious people in society. Blaming men alone for all kinds of fictitious social discrimination has become the norm, inspite of all kind of objective evidences to disprove the same. The vitriol is so vile that anyone who even enquires about the basis of the accusations are labelled as misogynists & "cancelled", as-if they're some sort of holocaust-deniers.

I've seen VC funds reject term sheets simply because founders were not prioritising this agenda in their brochures over the merit of their core products. Women appeasement is just a selling point to capitalists, they've nothing to do with actual womens overall welfare.

Things are going to get a lot worse for society before they get better. Voters in Italy & South Korea chose wisely early this year, but I don't know how (or if) our multi-cultural & multi-lingual country will be able to deal with this divisive politics.

So you don’t think women get harassed in parking garages I take? Figment of their imagination?

Jeroen

Doesn't it make sense to spend more on law and order? Are those few bad men going to stop harrassing women who use this reserved parking?

I totally support this policy. As men, we should change our narrow mindset and stop calling any women-friendly policy some sort of mischievous or decisive policy.

As for someone who remarked about increasing law enforcement, I would like to remind them that despite all kinds of extra security measures there was a lapse in PM security this year, so increasing enforcement is not the answer.

Make that: Politics 100

A very noble announcement but sadly, like so many other laws, this too will fade away quickly.
In cities (Pune especially) where even regular or private parking is misused, it is highly debatable as to how the local municipal corporations will enact this diligently.

Not so sure about that. There is not much evidence that these sort of issues can sorted by law and order. In fact if you look at the countries with the most strict law and order, you don’t necessarily see less crime, or more equality for different groups of people, let alone women.

Drink driving did not reduce because of harsher punishment and fines. It reduced because in a couple of decades the attitude of most people changed from perfectly,acceptable, to simply not done.

Women emancipation is much much complex and will take generations. So you need to highlight anything constantly. Big things and small,things. If anything this thread shows that there are a few men that, likely, had no clue as to what this inconvenience meant, or what it was supposed to inflict on many. They might still not agree on this particular policy, but hopefully they at least begin to understand that women might feel vulnerable and are indeed harassed in parking places. It’s not an Indian problem, it is a worldwide problem and many countries have enforced such rules. You can debate whether it is very efficient, but I just see it as a small step to make society at large aware of these issues. And also, some men might actually leave these parking spaces available to women. They might be taken by ignorant male chauvinist pigs, but again, it is a small thing each of us can do ourselves.

It’s a bit like the debate on the world’s green environment problem. Too often, including on this forum, I see people pointing to China as being the largest contributor and that needs to be addressed first. It might be true, but I still believe each person can do their own thing. E.g. eat less or no meat, turn the thermostat down, take the train instead of the car. Use a zoom meeting instead of travelling to a different location for a meeting. Get solar panels etc. Fly less, insulate your house etc etc

What you can do, does depend on your situation of course, where you live and so on. But the same analogy applies as I mentioned earlier with respect to drink and driving. It does help to change peoples mindset.

Improve the world, start by yourself has always held much truth for me.

Jeroen

On a practical basis in the Indian context, a woman driver drives up to a women-only parking sign and sees a car parked already over there. She waits for that car driver to come, the driver eventually does so and he turns out to be a ruffian. What exactly is the woman driver going to do ? Report him to the police ? Depending on the city this is happening, it is likely that the woman will be harmed or at least threatened. It is not so simple. Public parking places may also need surveillance. Again this would be a reactive rather than preventive measure. And what about the convenience that was expected with this reserved space in the first place ? Gone for a toss, replaced by harassment and even fear.

Yes, some men are awful!

Jeroen

I wouldnt exclude the possibility of an all-women fracas erupting either . People simply dont have patience with each other these days. Add to this the feeling of discrimination or entitlement.