Since living here for almost 3 months and going to Goa , India , I’ve come to the following conclusion: Where are all the women?

In India , most of the shopkeepers, restaurant staff, airline staff, and ALL of the military, police, and taxi drivers were men. Let’s take the airline industry. In some countries a vast majority of flight attendants and ground staff are women. In Japan I saw roughly 10 male ground staff and no male flight attendants. Other Asian airlines would have a majority of females and Australia and the US , well that is about 50 / 50. Men made up about 80% of flight attendants and ground staff in India and about 90% of waiters in the hotels and restaurants.

Here in Abu Dhabi the picture is a little sad for men; mostly I am talking about men from the subcontinent. There are absolutely no women in the construction industry and I’ve seen only one female taxi driver. There are a ton of Filipino women working various jobs around town as well as a lot of Middle Eastern women and a handful of western women around town too. I rarely see any Pakistani, Bangladeshi, or Indian women around town and this leads to the ever-present staring problem.

Groups of men will just stop and all stare at women when they walk past. It is disrespectful and in some ways perverted. Sometimes they even take photos of women when they walk past or even on the sly. One man will pose for a photo in front of a woman and a friend will take it. Saw it last night at a WOMAD concert.
Take away the occasional occurrence of what appears to the Western eye as lewd photo taking and you just have staring. It seems pretty common in India where not a lot is happening and everyone is just people watching.

So at the end of the day, is there malice behind those stares at men and women or is it just an innocent intercultural misunderstanding? I lean towards the latter because I’m accepting that staring is a cultural phenomenon in some places BUT when will it be realized that it is a cultural no-no to stare for so long in my culture?