India

From an article of the same title by Khozem Merchant of the Financial Times and printed in the LA Times:

Tahseen Bano's family was reluctant even to let her attend the free information technology classes designed to improve the career opportunities of women in Kanpur, India's leather-goods capital. So it is no surprise that her parents have now blocked progression to a job in the poor northern city. It seems technology may have met its match here: Social conservatism is denying women the chance to put their newly acquired computer literacy to use. Bano's frustration is shared by Datamation, a Delhi-based nonprofit group that runs the Kanpur project with funds from Microsoft Corp. "We try to empower women with skills to improve their chance of getting jobs. But conservatism is not a battle fought overnight. We are encountering the limitations of technology," said coordinator Ujjwala Subhedar... With funding of $100,000 from Microsoft, Datamation turned to Kanpur's best-known asset, the Indian Institute of Technology. What emerged was software for chikan embroidery incorporating a technique allowing users to retrieve designs from a database. The response from potential recruits among young, unemployed adults with little formal education was poor. Datamation's recruiters knocked on hundreds of doors in Kanpur's ancient alleyways but found that parents were loath to let their daughters out in public. Some relented and saw their daughters take to the technology with ease, and the effect on their self-esteem was profound. But what followed was a let-down. Bano's parents, among many others, banned unmarried daughters from taking on full-time design roles, which involved interacting with buyers, designers, shopkeepers and so on.

This video of the traffic pattern at an intersection (purportedly in India) is kinda funny:

Previously I mentioned India's 10 million missing daughters. From a story by the BBC News:

A doctor in India and his assistant have been sentenced to two years in jail for revealing the sex of a female foetus and then agreeing to abort it. This is the first time medical professionals have been jailed in such a case. Under Indian laws, ultrasound tests on a pregnant woman to determine the gender of the foetus are illegal. It has been estimated that 10m female foetuses may have been terminated in India in the past 20 years. Dr Anil Sabhani and Kartar Singh were caught in a sting operation in the northern state of Haryana. Government officials sent in three pregnant women as decoy patients to find out if the clinic would carry out abortions based on sex selection. Audio and video evidence showed the doctor telling one woman that tests had revealed that she was carrying a "female foetus and it would be taken care of". But convictions are rare due to lax and corrupt officials and the slow judicial system.

According to a study reported in the medical journal The Lancet and summarized in an article on NewScientist.com, approximately 10 million female fetuses may have been selectively aborted following ultrasound results in India during the past twenty years:

Their study of 1.1 million households across India reveals that in 1997, far fewer girls were born to couples if their preceding child or children were also female. "There was about a 30% gap in second females following the birth of any earlier females," Jha told New Scientist. When the firstborn child was a daughter, the sex ratio for second children among the 134,000 births in 1997 was just 759 girls for every 1000 boys. For a third child, just 719 girls were born per 1000 boys, if both the older children were girls. However, if the eldest children were boys, the sex ratios for the second and third child were about 50-50. Based "on conservative assumptions" the gap in births equates to about 0.5 million missing female births a year, says the team. Assuming the practice has been common in the two decades since ultrasound became widely available, this adds up to 10 million missing girls... ...in India's patriarchal society, daughters are regarded as a "liability", as she will belong to the family of her future husband...A surprising finding was that the disparity was about twice as large in educated mothers, those with at least an Indian grade 10 education, than in illiterate women. "Most things in health are worse among the poor,"...the preference for boys is likely to have "profound long-term consequences". In China, the cultural preference for boys and restrictions on family size are already having effects. Some reports suggest there are 40 million bachelors unable to find brides.