Here is an interesting excerpt about gender in Balinese society taken from an article written by Ana Dragojlovic entitled Performing Balinese Femininity in Migration. Without further ado here is the excerpt

The scholarship on gender in Bali is one which presents Bali not only as a gender-segregated society but as largely patriarchal. The extreme gender differentiation is obvious in rituals and symbolic activities. While men and women work together and women participate in many forms of economic production with men, that cannot be translated as gender equality as the tasks in their work are often hierarchically ordered, such that women’s work is often valued lower. Nakatani asserts that the Indonesian government characterises the woman’s role as both productive and reproductive but emphasises that motherhood and wifehood should come first. Strong gender segregation is obvious in the ritual sphere in which most of the offering preparation is done at home by women. Women also have a key role in making offerings for public activities such as Nyepi (Balinese New Year), Galungan and Hari Kuningan and the odalan (anniversary) in each of the desa adat temples in the course of the Balinese 210-day year. However, while women’s contribution to the ceremonies is quite substantial, Balinese Hinduism associates female fertility with pollution, and menstruating women are not permitted to enter the temple or participate in the rituals.

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Ancestors worship is the core of Balinese-Hindus. Ancestors are deified as spirits who have special affinity for the family, and can be counted upon to protect and help the family in time of disaster or need. The ancestors can help ward of evil forces and insure the prosperity, happiness, and peace.

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Alternately – like most forces in Hindu Bali – they can cause constant trouble, causing just the opposite of the above benevolence. Which of the two, they do depends upon the respect of the family accords them. If the family directs good feeling toward them, if the family invites them into the religious ceremonies, if the family makes regular offerings to them, and if the family maintains the shrines to the limit of their financial ability, then their powers will be turn to aiding the family. If the family neglects these courtesies, the sickness, death, and all sorts of unimaginably bad things may results.

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A child bears his father or mother name is a common practice in most parts of the world. However, in Bali, the parents, grandparents, or even great grandparents bear their offspring’s name.

In Balinese culture someone personal name is treated as though it is a classified information – At birth, each Balinese is given a sex indicator, caste title, birth order name and a personal/ real name. It is forbidden for younger people to call their older with his personal or real name. For children and young adolescent birth order names is used to call each other. And kinship relation terms invoked at best sporadically, and then only for purposes of secondary specification. In this kind of situation, a question arises, how do most Balinese address and refer to one another? The answer is: by teknonyms.
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