The written record on women is genuinely early and genuinely clear. Guru Amar Das forbade sati and the veil among Sikhs, permitted widow remarriage, and appointed women to head preaching districts in the 1550s; the Rehat Maryada bans dowry, forbids association with those who kill infant daughters, forbids the veil, and states that any Sikh may perform any Sikh ceremony, with no gender qualification anywhere in it. What the institutions do is different. No woman has performed kirtan or seva inside the sanctum of the Harmandir Sahib, which is custom rather than any written rule; the Punjab assembly passed a resolution in 2019 asking the Akal Takht and SGPC to permit it, and nothing changed. Women are almost absent from the Panj Piare in practice and from jathedar positions entirely. Punjab has among the worst child sex ratios in India and sex selection is documented among Sikh families in Punjab, Britain and Canada. Sikh women's organisations argue that they are not asking for reform but for enforcement of a five-hundred-year-old rule, and that framing is deliberate.