Women inferior in Hinduism?

One thing must be understood about Hindu religious culture - it is not scripture centered unlike, say, the Abrahamic religious culture. The highest of Hinduism's teaching is to discover the divinity within through the guide of a self-realised guru, not to prostrate to a God without through a road-map laid out in a scripture. If Hindu scriptures contain expressions where women would seem to be denigrated, it would be equally true that the same scriptures would also contain expressions equating women with divinity. The conclusion invariably drawn by Hindus is not that the scriptures are self-contradictory, but they have to be read in their contexts. The reader of the scriptures is expected to be a person with discriminatory capacities (discriminate as in the capacity to know the relative value of things and not as in "being unfair"). Therefore trying to establish that women have an inferior position in Hindu culture by quoting a few verses out of context flies in the face of the most obvious fact of Hinduism - that it expresses God not just as a male symbol as do the Abrahamic religions but also as a female.