The Gap Has a Number
India's median age is 29.2 years as of 2026. Over 58% of the population is under 35 [1].
Yet governing institutions across the world are dominated by people significantly older than those they represent. In India, the average age of elected representatives in the most recent parliament is 56, the highest ever recorded, with only 11% under 40 [1]. Japan's parliament averages 55. The US Senate averages 64. This is not a political observation. It is a structural one: the people making decisions about a predominantly young world are, on average, three decades older than the people they govern.
And this pattern does not stop at institutions. It runs through every family dinner, every office, every room where someone younger tries to say something that contradicts what an elder already believes.
Why Being Called a "Kid" Is a Power Move, Not a Description
In Hindi, "baccha" means child. Calling someone a "baccha" in an argument, regardless of whether they are 22 or 32, is not about their age. It is a rhetorical move to dismiss their perspective without engaging with it. You invalidate the source to avoid the substance.
Research on gerontocracy finds that older authority figures in hierarchical cultures rely on age as a credential precisely when their actual argument is weak [2]. Age and experience are not the same thing. Living through something is not the same as understanding it.
The "you are just a kid" label shuts down exactly the kind of disagreement that produces better outcomes for everyone. It is not wisdom asserting itself. It is authority protecting itself from being questioned.
Why Freedom Irritates People
System justification theory, first described by Jost and Banaji in 1994, explains why people, including those most disadvantaged by a system, defend and justify the existing social order [3]. The more someone has invested in and conformed to a system, the more threatened they feel when someone else refuses to.
When a young person chooses a different career, a different partner, or a different way of living, the irritation from the older generation is not really about that choice. It is about what the choice implies: that the choices they made were not the only valid ones, and possibly not the best ones.
Freedom irritates people who paid the cost of not having it.
The person who spent thirty years in a job they did not love, in a marriage they did not choose, does not easily watch someone simply opt out. That is not malice. That is cognitive dissonance. Understanding that does not make the irritation right. But it makes it human.
When Women Police Other Women: What the Research Says
There is a phrase that circulates across Indian households and conversations: "aurat aurat ki dushman hoti hai." Translated: women are their own worst enemies. The research gives it a more precise name.
Internalized misogyny occurs when women adopt and reproduce the sexist attitudes they were socialized into, often directing them at other women who appear to be breaking the rules [4]. It is not a personality defect. It is a predictable outcome of long exposure to a system that taught women their worth is tied to compliance.
A 2026 study specifically on Indian women found that higher levels of distrust toward other women are strongly correlated with higher levels of devaluing women, with a coefficient of 0.555 [5]. Women who internalized these norms show measurably higher psychological distress when other women violate them. The irritation is not about you. It is about what your freedom costs them retroactively.
But it is worth being fair here.
Not all of this is internalized oppression. Some of it is genuine protection. The world outside the family can be genuinely unsafe for women, and older women who have navigated it longer know this in ways younger women sometimes do not yet. The aunt who tells her niece to dress more conservatively is not always policing her. Sometimes she is scared for her. Sometimes she has a reason to be.
The problem is not concern. The problem is when concern becomes permanent enforcement, when a specific protective instinct becomes the justification for limiting someone's whole life.
Why Feminism Makes Sense, Especially Here
India's female labour force participation was 32.4% in 2025, against a global average of 51.1% [6]. Research consistently shows strong correlations between female education and delayed marriage, economic participation, and better health outcomes for children [7].
Feminism is not about making men the enemy. It is about examining which rules were written by whom, and whether those rules still serve everyone or only some. For older women who built their identities within strict social contracts, feminism can feel like a retroactive condemnation of their choices. It is not. But the discomfort is real, and it produces a specific reaction: resistance toward younger women who claim options that were not available before.
The reason many older women resist feminism is not because they are wrong to value family or tradition. It is because they were never given the language to separate what they genuinely chose from what they were conditioned to accept. Feminism gives you that language. It does not force a different choice. It makes the choice visible.
What Education Actually Does
India's National Family Health Survey of over 100,000 men found that higher educational attainment was one of the strongest predictors of favorable attitudes toward women's autonomy [8]. A randomized controlled trial in India found that a school-based gender attitude program converted 16% of initially regressive views, with effects persisting two years after the program ended [9].
Education does not automatically produce progressive attitudes. But it consistently produces exposure to perspectives beyond the immediate family, access to evidence, and the cognitive tools to examine inherited beliefs rather than simply reproduce them. It disrupts the echo chamber that makes any given set of assumptions feel like universal truth.
Women enrolling in postgraduate programs in India now outnumber men [10]. The same shift is producing a generation of women who are delaying marriage, entering professions, and demanding different conversations at home.
The generational gap in India is not really about age. It is about access: to education, to exposure, to the language to name what was always felt but never had words. The kids being dismissed are often the first generation to have that access at scale.
That is not a small thing. That is the thing.
A Note From Me
If you made it this far, thank you.
This one comes from conversations at home that went nowhere, not because anyone was wrong, but because we were operating from entirely different assumptions about what life is for. I have a lot of warmth for the older people in my life. They built things under conditions I have not had to face. I just think what they built should not be the ceiling for everyone who comes after them.
The research does not make those conversations easier. But it makes them less personal. And that, sometimes, is enough.
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See you in the next one.
Saral
References
The Rationalist. Gerontocracy in Indian Politics: Why Our Leaders Do Not Reflect the Country's Youth. Medium, September 2025. medium.com
Magni-Berton, R. & Panel, S. Gerontocracy in a Comparative Perspective. Sociology Compass, Vol. 15, 2021. onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Jost, J.T. & Banaji, M.R. The Role of Stereotyping in System Justification and the Production of False Consciousness. British Journal of Social Psychology, Vol. 33, 1994.
Szymanski, D.M. & Henrichs-Beck, C. Internalized Misogyny: The Patriarchy Inside. Journal of Integrated Social Sciences, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2024. jiss.org
Aathira, K. Internalized Misogyny and Women's Autonomy: A Correlational Study Among Indian Women. International Journal of Indian Psychology, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2026. ijip.in
World Bank. Female Labour Force Participation Rate, India. World Development Indicators, 2025. data.worldbank.org
Files, E.J. Higher Education for Women in India: Choices and Challenges. ERIC, 2016. files.eric.ed.gov
Chattopadhyay, S. et al. Men's Gender Role and Attitude Toward Sexual Autonomy of Women in India. NFHS-5, PMC, NIH, 2025. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Jayachandran, S. et al. Reshaping Adolescents' Gender Attitudes: Evidence from a School-Based Experiment in India. NBER Working Paper 25331. povertyactionlab.org
Irjms.com. Women in Higher Education in India: An Empirical Study, 2025. irjms.com
