Open any Hindi film, scroll through a fashion magazine, or read a court verdict on a woman’s “provocative” clothing, and you’ll notice a pattern. Women rarely get to be complicated, contradictory, or simply human. They’re cast as the sacrificing mother, the vamp, the nagging wife, or the goddess who can do no wrong. This constant flattening of real women into convenient types is what gender studies calls misrepresentation, and it shapes how an entire society sees half its population.
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What misrepresentation actually looks like
Every system of representation, whether it’s a newsroom, a film industry, or a textbook, is built by people with their own biases and blind spots. That makes some degree of partiality unavoidable. But misrepresentation goes further than an honest gap in perspective. It actively distorts women’s realities in specific, recognisable ways.
Dismissing a woman’s problem as an overreaction, showing her struggles as comic relief, treating a genuine grievance as a non-issue, or mocking her emotional responses are all forms of misrepresentation. Each one sends the same message: what women feel and experience doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously.
The media’s role in reinforcing this
Indian advertising and cinema have long relied on a narrow set of female archetypes. Studies analysing decades of Indian magazine advertisements found that despite some changes over time, women continued to be shown in stereotypical roles, largely dependent on the product category being sold. Research on Indian media points out that women are frequently depicted as homemakers or decorative figures, rather than as decision-makers with their own agency.
Newsrooms are not exempt either. A review of bylines across major English-language Indian newspapers found that women reporters remained concentrated in “soft” beats like lifestyle and entertainment, while political and business reporting stayed male-dominated, according to an analysis highlighted by India Foundation. When women are consistently kept out of certain kinds of stories, both as subjects and as storytellers, the resulting picture of what women can do becomes incomplete by design.
This is why the unit’s core idea matters so much: writing and media that claim to represent women must expose their authentic, lived experience. That’s far more likely to happen when women narrate their own stories instead of being described from the outside.
Difference vs. inequality
A lot of misrepresentation hides behind a simple confusion: treating difference as if it were inequality. Women’s experiences of the world differ from men’s. Biology, socialisation, safety concerns, and the burden of unpaid care work all shape a life that doesn’t map onto a man’s life point for point. That difference is real and worth documenting. But difference is not the same as being less capable, less rational, or less deserving of opportunity. When representation conflates the two, it ends up justifying unequal treatment as though it were simply “natural.”
Global data backs up how deep this gap still runs. UNICEF’s work in India notes that gender inequality shows up in homes, textbooks, and media from a young age, and that inequality affects opportunity rather than ability. The problem isn’t that women are different from men. It’s that difference keeps getting used as an excuse for unequal access to education, work, and representation.
The “devi” paradox
Nowhere is this confusion clearer than in the Indian habit of calling women “devi,” or goddess. On the surface, it looks like the highest form of respect. Dig a little deeper, and the picture gets more complicated.
Calling a woman a goddess lifts her out of the category of ordinary human beings. Goddesses don’t get tired, angry, ambitious, or afraid; they’re expected to be endlessly nurturing, endlessly patient, endlessly forgiving. When a real woman fails to match that impossible standard, she isn’t seen as a person having a normal human reaction. She’s seen as failing to live up to her “true nature.” Commentators have pointed out that this framing lets society sidestep the harder work of granting women equal rights as human beings, offering symbolic reverence instead of actual respect, as discussed in this analysis of goddess worship and feminism.
The pattern shows up starkly around violence too. Campaigns depicting goddesses like Lakshmi, Saraswati, and Durga with visible injuries, meant to shock viewers into confronting domestic violence, drew criticism from activists who argued the message itself was flawed: women shouldn’t need to be seen as divine to be treated with basic dignity, a critique captured in reporting by Al Jazeera on the backlash to these images.
So the “devi” label, however well-meant, ends up divesting women of their human pains and pleasures. It denies the everyday reality of periods, exhaustion, self-doubt, and desire, replacing it with an idealised image that no real person can, or should have to, live up to. That’s misrepresentation dressed up as praise.
Letting women define themselves
If misrepresentation happens when someone else decides what a woman is, then the corrective is fairly direct: let women define themselves. This isn’t a small stylistic choice in writing or media. It’s the difference between a character and a stereotype, between a source and a prop.
Every person’s sense of individuality comes partly from being able to narrate their own experience in their own words. When women are only ever described by others, whether by male authors, ad copywriters, or news editors, their identity gets shaped by an external lens that often carries its own assumptions about what women should want or feel. Genuine personhood requires the space to say “this is who I am” rather than having that decided for you.
Why first-person narratives matter
Indian women writers across regional languages have used fiction and memoir precisely to reclaim this space. Their work has been described as functioning as an archive told from within, by women who are the representatives of their own narrative rather than depending on an external one, according to research on feminist writing in Indian languages. That distinction, representing yourself versus being represented, is exactly what separates authentic portrayal from misrepresentation.
This applies well beyond literature. It matters in journalism, where the reporter interviewing a survivor of violence should let her describe her own experience rather than paraphrasing it into a more “palatable” narrative. It matters in advertising, where showing women in leadership doesn’t mean much if the script was written entirely around what a male creative director imagines leadership should look like. And it matters in everyday conversation, where interrupting a woman’s account of her own experience to “correct” it is a small but real act of taking her voice away.
Moving beyond stereotypes
Proper representation asks writers, filmmakers, and journalists to resist the shortcut of stereotype. A woman character doesn’t need to be either a victim or an inspiration; she can be both flawed and admirable in the same breath, the way real people are. She can have ambition and doubt, kindness and anger, all at once. UN Women’s programmes in India emphasise building gender-responsive systems precisely because equitable outcomes depend on how women are seen and included in decision-making, not just on policies written on paper. Representation, in that sense, isn’t a side issue to gender equality. It’s one of the mechanisms through which equality either gets built or gets blocked.
Getting representation right takes deliberate effort. It means asking, every time a woman appears in a story, an ad, or a headline: is this her voice, or is this what someone else assumes her voice should sound like? That single question does a lot of work in telling the difference between representation and misrepresentation.
What do you think?
What do you think? Think about the last time you saw a woman referred to as “devi” or placed on a pedestal in casual conversation. Did it feel like genuine respect, or did it quietly excuse her from being treated as an equal? And when you consume media, how often do you notice whether a woman’s story is being told by her, or about her?
References
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366605366_Status_of_women_in_contemporary_indian_media
- https://indiafoundation.in/articles-and-commentaries/women-in-indian-media/
- https://www.unicef.org/india/what-we-do/gender-equality
- https://feminisminindia.com/2017/09/19/paradox-goddess-worship/
- https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2013/10/10/bruised-goddesses-hurt-indian-feminists
- https://www.academia.edu/116830738/Feminist_Writers_In_Indian_Languages_Voices_Perspectives_And_Contributions
- https://asiapacific.unwomen.org/en/countries/india
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