Whenever someone tells me that misogyny no longer exists, which generally happens a few times a month (surprise, surprise), I tell them this story instead of bringing up any obvious empirical data. So it goes: A father picks his son up from school. They have fun driving home and listening to wonderful music, but on the highway, they get into a terrible car crash. The father dies on the spot, and the son, facing a grievous injury, is somehow rushed to the hospital. He is prepped for the surgery that will save his life, but just as the doors to the operation theatre open, the surgeon on call enters, and then says: “I cannot operate on this child. He is my son.”
There is a huge, heavy silence at this point every single time. Everybody wracks their brains trying to figure it out, and there is always the one person that whispers, “But the father is dead!” The punchline, of course, is that the boy’s mother is the doctor on call.
The doctor is my mom
The point of this story isn’t to marvel at the cleverness of the riddle. It is to make the listener look inside themselves and notice why their mind defaulted to male authority. It is a small but humiliating revelation, and in my opinion, one that is far more instructive than any chart or statistic could be. The lesson is simple: authority, in our minds, is coded male.
This is the default programming the world seems to have given us. It proves that despite our degrees and our privilege, the instant we think of “ultimate authority,” our subconscious still throws up a man. This is also the central paradox of attending a top-tier Indian college: we confuse privilege with protection. We spend enormous sums of money, time, and emotional energy to secure a spot in a bubble where we believe that the crude and obvious misogyny of the outside world won’t touch us. We think our education is protection enough, but it’s not.
The Echo Effect
Last week, when I raised my hand in class, the boy sitting behind me muttered, “Here we go again,” in a theatrical whisper that was loud enough for half the class to hear. The professor smiled in that patronising, end-of-conversation way that men have perfected. I put my hand down. Later that day, a friend texted me to say I should “pick my battles.” She meant well. Everyone does, when they tell women that. Pick your battles. As though we aren’t already fighting one by simply existing in spaces that were never designed for us. As though asking to be taken seriously is an act of war.
I thought about that phrase all evening. Women are taught strategy before they are taught speech. We learn from a young age how to modulate our tone, how to fold our feelings neatly and keep them locked in the drawer we have labelled as “too rude, must not say this.”We’re expected to be articulate but not assertive, smart but never intimidating, confident but never loud. The line between “brilliant” and “abrasive” is razor- thin, and it’s drawn entirely by other people.
I’ve noticed that when men speak in class, they do so with the assurance of someone whose voice has always belonged in the room. Their sentences don’t tremble at the end. The same point, said by a man, lands as insight. From a woman, it’s treated as interruption. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve said something in a class only to have it repeated ten minutes later by a boy who suddenly receives a wave of nods and murmurs of agreement.
I’ve started calling it “the echo effect”- how your own voice becomes more credible when it bounces off a male throat. This is the invisible syllabus of being a woman in college. You learn that every opinion must be perfectly phrased, every argument impeccably sourced, every emotional undertone carefully hidden. You learn to preface your statements with “I might be wrong, but-” because the room needs to be reassured that you’re not threatening anyone’s authority. You learn that male mediocrity is the baseline, and female excellence is the minimum requirement.
The Degrees of Freedom
I don’t think most people that haven’t had the experience of being a woman realise how much energy goes into the simple act of being taken seriously. Every word feels like a small performance. Every statement needs proof, preface, and politeness. It’s a full-time job to appear reasonable. The thing is, the men in these rooms aren’t evil. They don’t shout or sneer or call you names. They’re very polite, often charming, sometimes even self-deprecating. They’ll call themselves feminists without irony. They’ll post infographics on Women’s Day and genuinely believe they’re allies. But watch closely. Watch how they interrupt. How they assume you’ll take notes during a group project. How they say your name with that slight edge of teasing that turns intellect into novelty. Once we begin to, can we ever truly stop noticing?
Even the majors themselves are gendered. Engineering, economics, finance are coded masculine. Sociology, literature, and psychology are coded feminine. The division is but a reflection of what the system values versus what it tolerates. Women who push into masculine-coded spaces face a very peculiar form of microaggression: polite questions, “friendly” nudges, whispered warnings. You’re told not to intimidate, not to challenge too forcefully, not to make anyone uncomfortable. The men who occupy these spaces rarely think twice about the same rules because they are already assumed to belong.
The contradictions are glaring when you zoom out. For instance, female enrolment in Indian universities is at an all-time high. In the “top” colleges we can observe that women are roughly sixty to eighty percent of the classrooms. And yet the official Female Labour Force Participation Rate in India hovers at around 33%. We study, we excel, we graduate, and then disappear, or are rerouted into “safe” careers or even marriages that reward the conditional capital of our degrees rather than our intellects. An elite degree is thus a ticket into elevating out social status.
And that, I think, is the cruelest paradox of all. The degree, the long hours, the internships, the projects: they are all meant to promise freedom, are they not? The reality is that freedom is conditional. Classrooms are battlegrounds where privilege and misogyny intersect. Your privilege may let you be present, but it does not guarantee that you will be heard.
the hidden curriculum
The subtlety of misogyny is what makes it suffocating. It isn’t shouted. It isn’t obvious. It is the boy in your tutorial who sighs when you raise your hand, as if your voice is gone an inconvenience. It is the professor who praises him for the same insight you offered ten minutes earlier. It is the friend who tells you to smile more during presentations.
Sometimes, misogyny wears the face of another woman. She laughs at the jokes you find exhausting, she whispers that you’re too aggressive, she warns you that men can’t handle a woman who speaks plainly. These women are survivors of the same system. They have learned that conformity, strategic compliance, and policing other women are safer than disruption. They call themselves friends, allies even, and yet they become the enforcers, because internalised misogyny is just that strong. You learn quickly that women can be as cruel, as territorial, and as invested in policing the system as men. This hurts more for me, because they come from a place you’re supposed to inherently trust. Yet, even with the same positionality, they remind you constantly that being a woman in this space is a performance, and that performance must be calibrated not only against men’s expectations but also women’s compliance with the status quo.
Then there are the women who are friends with the misogynists. The ones who laugh at their jokes, who shrug when they interrupt you, who casually excuse their behaviour with a smile and a “he’s just like that.” I used to be one of them. It is still complicity, after all. I recall the dialogue from Gone Girl, the Cool Girl monologue. It is about a woman performing perfection for the male gaze. She is effortlessly fun, never complains, laughs at the right jokes, swallows her ambition, and conceals her opinions and becomes the “Cool Girl” that men claim to want. She presents herself as low-maintenance, agreeable, and endlessly accommodating, all while hiding the complexity, anger, and intellect that might make her “too much.” It is a survival tactic, a performance, and a damning critique of how women are conditioned to erase themselves to exist comfortably in a man’s world. The Cool Girl Curriculum is something that women teach themselves, especially at the college level.
Eyes Wide Open
Calling yourself a feminist, even within an educational and supposedly liberal setup is also controversial. The label is sticky and reductive. You become “angry” or “bitter” or “overly sensitive.” Any argument you make in your classes is filtered through this lens first; your intellect is secondary to your supposed temperament. A professor told me recently, after I had finished a presentation: “Academia is meant to be neutral. Your writing is too emotional.” I asked him to point out, then, what exactly was emotional in my paper, and he immediately changed the topic.
It still stung, because it was a reminder that the system is designed to invalidate us. Yet, there is a strange resilience that comes from this constant negotiation. You notice the patterns, the small gestures, the ways in which authority is coded male, in which brilliance in women is exceptional, and you start to see the cracks. The microaggressions, the whispered dismissals, the complicity of friends and peers- these are all symptoms of a system that fears equality more than it fears failure. It is in naming them, in refusing to let them slide unnoticed, that power can ever shift.
Just like that riddle at the start, the assumptions hide in plain sight. The mind still freezes at the thought of a woman as the “doctor,” the expert, the one in charge. Noticing that pause and then laughing at your own brain for assuming otherwise is the first act of the play in which we must at least reconsider the parts we have been cast in.
