The Sunday Mail
This week, we mark International Women’s Day, a day that still needs to be marked rather than celebrated since, despite significant progress and the growing number of women who have broken through the limits imposed by all cultures, we have a long way to go.
Legal impediments have been removed in almost all countries, and in many ways that was the major achievement of the 20th Century.
Starting with perhaps the most basic, the 20th Century saw legal changes that allowed the right of women to vote, the right of women to enter higher education and the right of women to earn their own living and manage their financial affairs.
But this was largely just clearing away what had kept women back, a process that was necessary but was far from sufficient to grant all people full equality. This is not to denigrate the powerful women’s movements, backed by a growing slice of men, who fought through the legal changes. Many of those battles were long and required a great deal of effort.
But anyone who thinks that legal changes, followed by administrative changes that granted women legal equality and equality in other areas, such as making it illegal to offer women lower pay for equal work because “they did not need the money”, was enough are wrong. The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day, that collectively we can all #Break The Bias, sums up precisely where the struggle must continue. And while it took most of the 20th century to get the legal and institutional changes through we need to get the people changes through a bit quicker in the 21st century. And while cultural and personal attitudes are changing, there are still a remarkable number of glass ceilings everywhere that need to be removed.
The fetters of bias are in some ways stronger than the fetters that were imposed once by the law. Legal changes are easy to make, or at least a lot easier to make than changing perceptions and attitudes.
Sometimes efforts to accelerate the process can be deviated. One Zimbabwean example is the creation in our home-grown 2013 Constitution of 60 additional seats in the House of Assembly reserved for women. The Constitution writers reckoned this was a short-term requirement considering changes that were already seen and so put a two Parliament limit on this.
Gazing at the candidate lists and the number of women in constituency seats made everyone realise that short-term it was not, and an amendment was made to give another two terms, although interestingly there was some flexibility now put in place with some of these seats needed to go to young women and women living with disabilities, other groups grossly unrepresented. We can see future possibilities.
Some have suggested that the actual creation of these seats allowed those with biases to resist progress. If women can be diverted into the special seats then we can push men into the ordinary seats without any problems.
That can be a particular attitude where we have a political party without constituency choice of candidates and without primaries, but even with these local attitudes need change very often.
The Senate system of insisting that the party lists for the provincial Senate seats must alternate men and women avoided that and ensured that high-quality women candidates were sought and elected.
The extra wrinkle that the first name on the provincial lists had to be a woman gave a small redress through odd numbers of seats allocated to removing gender bias through the fact that traditional leaders, who have a set of Senate seats, are men.
Quotas are an effective and frequently necessary tool to make required changes, but they need to be thought through very carefully to ensure they are effective and are changing attitudes and are not just window dressing. On the positive side we see huge changes in education around the world, including Zimbabwe. Here the battle has shifted from opening doors for girls and women to ensuring that they are not blocked by family or cultural attitudes from going to those doors. In Zimbabwe this has seen the BEAM programme paying tuition fees for children from poor families, now a third of our school children, placing particular emphasis on preventing school girls being forced to drop out, and the growing pressure against child marriages has also kept doors open.
In many countries, and Zimbabwe is now moving into this group, a majority of students in tertiary education are women, not because there are more smarter women since ability appears to be gender neutral, but because women see the absolute necessity of being qualified if they are to forge ahead. And in many ways since these young women must be someone’s daughters they are also changing attitudes a generation higher.
Bias starts creeping in after leaving school and college. Nothing formal you must understand, since these days that is likely to be illegal, but still definitely there if you look hard in even the best organisation and more obvious in most. Even recruitment is generally free of bias, even in traditionally male occupations, but then look at those chosen a few years later for the fast track to supervisory and managerial slots and you start seeing a different story.
You still get those who label women’s rights and gender equality as a “western” influence, with westerners having to look for other excuses and conservatives getting shrill about “traditional gender roles” instead. Insecure men will find a lot of excuses, including in most religious traditions religious reasons. None wash. The changes we have seen were largely, so far as legal and institutional matters were concerned, 20th century changes and pushed and resisted pretty much the same everywhere. The new stress on removing bias so those changes become the normal and practical way of living are being applied within societies where most people have been born and brought up in societies that had already given the legal rights but had yet to move forward to changing minds, or at least changing all minds.
So we still have a long way to go, but the path is now more personal and cultural than legal and institutional. And the International Women’s Day themes in recent years reflect this requirement with this year’s theme being quite blunt: #Break The Bias. And we must do this collectively since all of us, individually in our own minds, attitudes and concepts need to #Break The Bias
