The Pressure Cooker Effect: 4 Stages Of How Sexism Conditions Indian Women's Brains

In India, sexism is rarely announced with a drum roll. It usually arrives quietly. It sits next to you during dinner and asks why you are not married yet. It lives in school report cards that praise boys for confidence and girls for obedience. It appears in offices where women are told to smile more while doing twice the work. Over time, it stops being an external problem and begins to live inside the mind.

Sexism is not just a social inconvenience. It is a psychological conditioning system. The brain adapts to what it is repeatedly exposed to. Here are the four familiar stages through which sexism quietly conditions Indian women’s brains.

STAGE 1: Early Psychological Conditioning

“Do not sit like that. Do not talk loudly. Do not stay out late. Do not attract attention.”

Indian girls are introduced to sexism before they even learn their own surnames. Psychologists call this gendered conditioning, and it begins in early childhood. According to developmental psychology, repeated messages during formative years shape core beliefs about safety, worth, and identity. When boys are encouraged to explore, girls are taught to self-restrict.

Research published by the American Psychological Association shows that girls internalize fear based learning much earlier than boys. In India, this conditioning is turbocharged. Girls are taught that their safety depends on their behaviour. If something goes wrong, the question is rarely what happened to her. It is always what she was wearing, where she was going, and why she was alone.

Neurologically, this creates hypervigilance. The amygdala, the brain’s fear centre, becomes overactive. The result is chronic anxiety, second-guessing, and a constant scanning of the environment. Many Indian women do not relax in public spaces because their brains were never taught that public spaces belong to them.

STAGE 2: Internalised Self Surveillance. Becoming Your Own Watchman

After years of being watched, judged, corrected, and warned, women learn a dangerous psychological trick. They start watching themselves. This is called internalised self-surveillance.

Indian women monitor their clothes, ambition, laughter, friendships, and even their anger. They edit themselves before the world gets a chance to. It is like having an internal CCTV camera that never switches off.

Psychologist Sandra Bartky described this as women learning to see themselves from the outside, constantly evaluating how they appear to others. This also explains why so many Indian women struggle with imposter syndrome. When you are taught to shrink, success feels like a mistake waiting to be corrected.

STAGE 3: Adjustment Is She Only Therapy

“Adjust at home. Adjust in marriage. Adjust at work. Adjust with abuse. Adjust quietly.”

Indian women are raised on one powerful word. Adjust.

 Neuroscience explains why. Long-term emotional suppression raises cortisol levels, damaging the hippocampus, the brain’s centre for memory and emotional regulation. The result is brain fog, emotional numbness, low motivation and a constant sense of overwhelm. The World Health Organisation reports that Indian women are almost twice as likely to suffer from depression as men, yet are far less likely to seek help.

STAGE 4: How Institutions Quietly Support Sexism

Sexism does not survive on individual attitudes alone. It is backed by institutions that look neutral on paper and discriminatory in practice.

In the workplace, the law technically exists, but psychology tells a different story. The Vishaka Guidelines of 1997 and later the POSH Act  2013, commonly known as, were meant to create safer professional environments for women.

On paper, these laws mandate Internal Complaints Committees and time-bound redressal. In reality, many women do not report harassment because they fear retaliation, character assassination, or being labelled difficult. The brain reads this risk clearly. Survival comes before justice.

In India, marital rape is still not recognised as a crime, because the law continues to believe that marriage automatically comes with permanent consent. As if “I do” is a lifelong permission slip. This legal blind spot ignores basic psychology. Consent is not a one-time event, and intimacy under fear, pressure, or obligation is not intimacy at all; it is trauma.

The Pressure Cooker Effect

I call this the pressure cooker effect that we learn as Indian women. We are taught to keep everything inside, hold the lid tight, adjust the flame, and keep smiling while the pressure quietly builds. Everyone around us waits for the whistle, and when it finally blows, they ask why we are so emotional.

You are not overreacting. Your nervous system is responding exactly as it was trained to. Seeking help is not failure; it is unlearning silence and reclaiming your own mind.

Views expressed by the author are their own.