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  1. @valhalla: My thoughts are that women who want to be successful know that it is going to take a lot more work/committment for them than the average man to get there and develop this serious attitude towards work and that rubs off on their psyche towards most aspects of life – this is what I consider as “hardened”. However, this is too simplistic a picture to be truthful and my (female) boss has told me about colleagues of mine who have developed a different attitude – where they think that just because they are women, if they achieve anything, they should get extra credit for it – that is they are already superior because, being a woman, they have achieved what they have achieved. My boss is in favor of equal oppurtunity for all but she will be one of the people to back off from what she calls “feminist” movements (discussed this with her today). She says it worse when you are a successful woman doing that because the pro-feminist women treat her as the biggest enemy. Complicated web out there.

  2. I guess I did not entirely fathom the ‘hardened’ rationalization. If women have been hardened over the years with injustices and an inherently more uphill task than their male counterparts every step of the way, wouldn’t they have overcome their insecurities and made peace with the resulting mistrust after a certain stage? Or are you saying all this has actually traumatized their thinking permanently?
    With all the crap that many women have to endure in general, it is definitely not across the board in these times though.

  3. I guess I was asking whether the girls get hardened by the time they are teenagers.. If so, I believe that the experiences that harden them are more home and family-based than school and work-based. I say this because inevitably, in coed schools, most of the girls are the ones who get the soft spot of teachers and they have to do about as much or lesser than the guys to get the same scores on most oppurtunities (again Chennai-based experiences and that too my own school years).

  4. I’ve been a schoolgirl in Mumbai, a collegeian, a professional, a citizen, friend, employee, leader, collegue, client…and my experiences echo yours.

  5. I have had a woman boss for the last 4 years now… My personal experience (and this has got to be from just one experience) is that she is insecure and she most certainly is a control freak… I see it all around that even in the 21st century, women have to do a lot more n still achieve a lot less than men around them… I do get the feeling that they have been hardened… but at the same time, I see it even in kids that girls take things a lot more seriously than boys in school… I mean girls like to be good (and am merely comparing the average between boys and girls here)… While boys seem to care lesser about that by the end of school, it becomes a lot more important for girls to prove that they are the good ones… Its something in the psyche of how we are brought up… Again, these are experiences of a school boy in Chennai… Maybe it is different in different places, generations, et. al. Ur comments?