Practice of Sikhi and gender equality: a comparative study

Abstract

Guru Nanak Dev Ji advocated equality for women. He raised his voice to get them an equal status with men in the domain of religion and society. The study aims to investigate the relevance of Guru Nanak Dev Ji’s teachings about gender equality in contemporary times. The first objective was to compare views on gender equality in Sikh and non-Sikh participants. Another objective was to assess the relationship between practice of Sikhi and gender equality in Sikh participants. Convenience and purposive sampling were used to collect data from a sample of 50 married men of ages 25-40 years residing in Delhi NCR, 25 of which were Sikh and the other half belonging to other religions. Gender Norms Scale was used to record attitudes towards gender equality. Spearman’s Rank Order Correlation and t test analysis was used to statistically analyze the data. Findings indicated that practice of Sikhi did not emerge as a significant variable influencing views on gender equality. Further research into other concomitant with larger samples is required.