Martin HenryOF THE over 1,400 Jamaicans murdered last year, relatively few were women. This is surprising when you stop to consider the link between women and crime and that, according to police statistics, most murders are acts of reprisal and internecine war between communities.
Women are playing a significant role in the ongoing slaughter of predominantly young, black, lower-class males. A "Fed-up Jamaican Female" wrote a hard-hitting letter to "all the women who share the lives of gunmen and criminals" which was carried by The Gleaner on March 1. When a woman dies by violence there tends to be an exceptional outpouring of grief and concern. Although not intended, greater concern for the death of people in any category tends to diminish the value placed on the lives of people in other categories.
International Women's Day and the Women's Movement in general allow a necessary focus on the rights and condition of women and on taking necessary steps for improvement. There is also a growing focus on the rights and condition of children.
SERIOUS CONSEQUENCE
One serious consequence, and not always unintended, from the emphasis on women's and children's rights and conditions is the demonisation of men. But the family of women, children and men is the basic unit of society. Another Gleaner letter writer [Sunday, March 6] has rightly called for a national campaign on rebuilding the family unit. As a society we have had our own special challenges to the family unit. But globally the separate rights movement is posing its own serious challenges. Any "success" which undermines the integrity of the family can only be a pyrrhic victory with no real winners.
So how are Jamaican women doing? It is easier and more newsworthy to headline their disadvantages and how much more is left to be done. But as we have observed, they are, thankfully, getting killed much less than their male counterparts. They are living longer and are more literate. Females dominate the education system both in increasing numbers and in performance from primary to tertiary.
A raft of legislation has eliminated most, if not all legal handicaps which women have traditionally faced. In the 2004 Human Development Report of the UNDP, the gender-related development index for Jamaica is considerably better than the general human development index. The GDI rank is 64 out of 177 countries; the HDI is 79.
Yes, there are more women unemployed. And the ratio of female to male earned income is 0.66. This is one of the major sore points in gender relationships. But the ratio in Canada is 0.63, the United States 0.62, the UK 0.60. There are just a few countries with a ratio higher than ours: The Scandinavian countries, Australia, The Bahamas, and, surprisingly, Ghana and Tanzania, among them.
But before women make the programmed bawl out against discriminatory practices and the glass ceiling they should read an insightful Newsweek column written some years ago by George F. Will, 'Lies, Damned Lies, and...' and the data sources which went into Will's analysis.
While there may be a discrimination factor, Will argued that in an environment which has removed virtually all of the legal handicaps disadvantaging working women, "earnings differentials often reflect different professional paths that are cheerfully chosen because of different preferences, motivations, and expectations." In the flow of stats were the facts that 80 per cent of working women bore children and most made job choices with this in mind; and males, who are disproportionately represented in higher-risk, higher-paying jobs, account for 92 per cent of job-related deaths.
CENTRAL QUEST
The central quest of the Women's Movement is 'equality'. This year's theme is 'Gender Equality Beyond 2005...' But what does that mean, in practice? It cannot mean point by point equivalence between females and males. Equivalence has to break down at some point on the road to infinity. Nature, for instance, has made the biological imposition of womb and breasts on women which come with special responsibilities and burdens -- for reproduction and child-rearing. Those tasks simply cannot be equalised and there must be all kinds of social implications flowing from the facts of biology.
There is an imposed biological complementarity between the two halves of the human race. It is unthinkable that there would be a design for biological complementarity without matching psychological and social complementarity which would define gender roles in a functional society and which would be resistant to social engineering beyond some as yet unknown limit.
Martin Henry is a
communication specialist.
