Irrespective of their dress, women attract male gaze, IIIT-Hyderabad study

The study indicates that gaze objectification extend to women even if they wear non-sexualized dress.

Hyderabad: Irrespective of whether women wear a revealing dress or non-sexualized attire, they will attract male gaze and will be sexually objectified, a novel study on visual gaze by IIIT-Hyderabad researchers, said.

The study funded by Department of Science and Technology’s (DST) Cognitive Science Research Initiative and presented at the Cognitive Science Society (CSS) conference 2024 in Rotterdam in July, shows how women experience objectification even in a non-sexualized attire.

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The paper titled, “Objectifying Gaze: An Empirical Study With Non-Sexualized Images” authored by Ayushi Agrawal, Srija Bhupathiraju under the guidance of Prof. Kavita Vemuri of the Cognitive Science Lab at IIIT-H examined visual gaze with eye tracking technology using cognitive science theories.

The study indicates that gaze objectification extend to women even if they wear non-sexualized dress. “Regardless of attire, a woman is subjected to a very intrusive gaze in a public or any other space for that matter,” says Prof Kavita Vemuri.

A key difference observed between objectifying gaze in the Western and Indian contexts lies in the focus of the gaze. In Western studies, the gaze often centres more on sexual body parts than on the face, while in the IIITH study, the gaze was on both sexual body parts and on the face.

“The Indian population still places a lot of importance on facial features. The evaluation of attractiveness and other social information is all extracted from the face,” explains Kavita.

Interestingly, the IIITH study said that both male and female participants were found to be visually objectifying women.

When a female objectifies another female, it may mean one of two things. One is self-objectification, internalizing socio-cultural attitudes and the second is a social evaluation. The male gaze on a woman’s body parts is a process of reducing her to an ‘object’ of desire. It has to be noted that male participants also self-objectify as revealed from the study,” says Ayushi.