I always find pretty amazing how the indian press empowers women, statistically. Allow me to explain that in a little detail: Today’s headline in the TOI read: Girls outshine boys in CBSE 12th result here, and here. Ditto with Hindustan times
What a sexist way to announced that the CBSE 12th class results have been announced!
This also makes me wonder who are TOI and HT (and all other newspapers) really trying to impress? The girls who passed CBSE class 12th exams? The girls in 11th grade who want to insult their male counterparts by claiming percentage victory of their seniors? The village idiot who doesn’t send his daughter to a CBSE school (Forget the fact that he can’t/won’t read english dailies)? Okay lots of questions, which you can answer in the comments.

If you want the same fact statistically analyzed even more, I am willing to oblige. This year, 637,578 students – 264,248 female and 373,330 male – took the Class 12 board exams in the country and abroad. If I ran a daily: the headlines would be:
1) 288957 boys and 243282 girls pass this years CBSE. Boys outshine girls, yet again
2) 19% more boys pass CBSE than girls, buck up females!
3) Mass hysteria in women as CBSE 12th girls fail to pass (as much as boys)

For one more example of selective statistics for empowering women, now bring your attention to something we’re so used to seeing that we hardly notice the prejudice. Do an exercise: Grab today’s newspaper and search for any news which mentions an accident (where > 10 people died). I bet you’ll be able to find the pattern, “52 people died in a bus accident near blahblahland. 19 women, 3 children and 4 senior citizens were identified dead in this horrible accident”. Yeah right, what happened to the men, Sherlock?
The newspaper almost wants to say: “Some men also died, we’re too lazy to count. If you’ve attended kindergarten, do the math yourself. Anyway, they deserved to die. They were not cute little children or helpless women or old dying senior citizens. We won’t evoke any sympathy from the reader if I mention such trivial details.”

And this really grinds my gears.