I’m a big fan of The Washington Post’s Emily Wax, whose work with the paper I’ve followed for several years.

She has a story in today’s WaPo on the sexual harassment – or “Eve teasing” – women face in India. It dovetails with many of the issues brought up by the Egyptian Centre for Women’s Rights survey on sexual harassment in Egypt and around which I wrote my oped in July.

The article discusses how India’s economic changes have impacted gender relations:

“For India’s middle-class urban women, the past decade has brought unprecedented opportunities to advance in a social order long dominated by men. But a powerful male backlash has accompanied the women’s revolution, an upwelling of resentment that has expressed itself in sexual violence and harassment.”

“In India today, women are working in lucrative retail and technology jobs, sometimes in cities far from their home towns. Economic independence has, in some cases, allowed them to delay marriage and early childbirth. Social mobility among India’s young is also undermining the country’s traditional joint-family system, in which couples are expected to move in with the husband’s parents. The shift has empowered the modern Indian wife, freeing her from the scourge of the bossy, nosy mother-in-law.”

“At the same time, however, the number of reported instances of domestic violence, rape and dowry killings is spiking in South Asian cities, according to women’s groups, demographers and sociologists.”

During a trip to India in June/July, I swapped storie with Indian women friends about how our respective countries had changed over the past few years and how they had reacted to such changes, especially when it came to women and their expectations/what was expected of them.

It was particularly interesting to hear from one new friend about her marriage to a man she’d met on an online dating site.  I told her that the U.S. media often highlighted stories that showed that children of Indian immigrants to America chose to follow family tradition and go for arranged marriages so I was surprised to hear that online dating sites were becoming popular in India.

Pompa and her husband said some Indian families in the U.S. were sometimes more conservative than their counterparts “back home”. As an Egyptian who spent large chunks of my childhood outside of Egypt only to go “home” and discover how many traditions I’d been told about had changed, I understood.