Glenda SimmsCountries that demonstrate best practices in their responses to the serious social, psychological and economic barriers that still confront women and girls at this point in the 21st century, seek to address a number of issues from an objective developmental stance.
According to author Isobel Coleman, there are big pay-offs for women's rights.
In the Volume 82, Issue 3 of the May/June 2004 edition of Foreign Affairs, Ms. Coleman pulled together a significant body of research which points to the fact that "women are critical to economic development, active civil society and good governance, especially in developing countries."
In fact, Coleman's discussions point out that in regions where women have managed to close the educational gaps and have moved ahead of men and boys in educational achievement, there is marked acceleration in the economic and social capital.
It is against this world view that Japan has taken the boldest of steps to confront an ancient, formidable and male-dominated traditional culture and do what it must do to keep its economy and human capital on the cutting edge,
in a global and crassly competitive
market-driven world.
A recent report out of Tokyo, carried in a local newspaper, informed the Jamaican society that the Japanese government has put in place a set of measures to ensure women's participation at the highest levels of decision-making in the public sector.
To ensure the achievement of the government's ambitious goals, the Japanese state has factored into its plan the following women-supportive initiatives:
Shorter work hours for women who are raising children and caring for family members.
Paternity leave for male public
servants.
The encouragement of private
companies to rehire women who left their jobs after childbirth.
The encouragement and mentoring of female entrepreneurs.
In short, the Japanese government has committed to deconstruct some of the systemic barriers that women still face in a fast changing and technological age.
However, as lofty as these ideals might be in a solidly entrenched male centred culture, women of the world need to note that Japan is forced to deal differently with its female population because of a declining birth rate and a serious labour shortage, and not because the state is ideologically committed to deconstruct its patriarchal values.
In light of this, women and immigrants are becoming more and more important to the Japanese nation and they will get further along the path to social justice in this climate.
WOMEN'S STRUGGLES
It is within this context of the renewed discussion on women's rights in the modern world in general, and in the Jamaican society in particular, that this writer took an interest in Gleaner contributor Ian McDonald's article, 'Let women keep the lamps', which was published in the January 1 edition of The Gleaner. Mr. McDonald pointed out that in the Caribbean region, "girls are simply doing much better, working harder, undertaking more serious pursuits, reading more, thinking more deeply, achieving more than boys as they come into maturity."
However, we need to listen to the subtext in McDonald's analysis. He is reiterating what our great grandmothers felt, what our grandmothers knew, what our mothers feared and what we must confront. He argues that "men are going to fight to the death to hold on to the privileges, power and positions that they will no longer deserve."
Furthermore, McDonald cautions women that even when men recognise that they are losing the gender war they will "fall back on their last line of defence, the biological imperative." In other words, since men do not have uteruses and therefore are not assigned the role of child-bearing, they can also dodge their responsibility to share
equally in child-rearing and caring. In this way they will justify their fossilised attitudes towards women in their societies.
This 'fall back position' in the struggle against women's equality and justice will always be 'sexy', but women need to continue thinking 'outside the patriarchal box'. They need to find strategies to ensure that the 'lamps in the cave keep burning' so that even one generation of human beings can experience peace, justice, prosperity, equality and dignity in every nation state in the civilised world.
Like Japan, all other societies will have to 'shift the gender gear'. Jamaica also will be forced to get onboard. But Jamaican women will be more than 'gear sticks'. We are preparing not to be on 'automatic pilot' forever. We plan to plot our flight path, oil our landing gears and move around the turbulence of the hot air of the men that Ian McDonald so aptly describe.
ADOPT STRATEGIES THAT WORK
To go beyond the 'hot air syndrome' women in the Jamaica society should revisit some of the strategies that are adopted in societies that are considered to be leaders in economic growth and development.
To this end, in Jamaica a number of proactive and progressive actions need to be identified to deal with a growing list of serious social ills. For instance, the approaches to deal with teenage pregnancies need to be revisited.
Every school and the communities served by these institutions should do everything possible to support young women and girls to complete their education. This means that teenagers who get pregnant should have the right to continue their education in their home school if they so desire.
Under the Convention on the Right of the Child, every Jamaican girl child is afforded the right to continue her education in spite of her pregnancy. The facilitation of such education by the state is a right, not a privilege.
This does not mean that the state should not fully fund the alternative services for such young women. However, the time has come for updated data to identify how many girls are forced or coerced to discontinue their education because they are pregnant. Certainly, issues of pregnancy, parenting and school completion should be revisited at this time.
We should do this revisiting because, in Jamaica, like in many other countries of the modern world, the average girl performs much better than the average boy, and the data show that our young women are better represented in the highest levels of our educational systems. In spite of this, the trends indicate that social planners and policy makers have yet to make concerted efforts to ensure that women do not experience inferior labour market outcomes and suffer because of the hypocritical moralistic shadow games of the gatekeepers of patriarchy.
Another important issue is that of childcare. In our country, there is no clamour for flexible and accessible day-care because we live in a society in which women are programmed to accept that there will always be a poor, unemployed, marginalised and needy woman who will 'pick up the slot' and look after other people's children while hers are relegated to the street corners.
In this scenario the type of childcare centres that are essential to healthy child development are lacking. Far too many young children are locked up in parlours watching TV and playing with plastic toys under the silent presence of a nice woman who loves children, but who does not understand the developmental needs and the strategies that help to stimulate cognitive, emotional and spiritual development of humans.
To add insult to injury, there are very few public spaces where child carers can be seen with their charges enjoying the beauty of the natural environment. Everybody is scared to be
outside.
Some might argue that the concept of 'child care' is a very middle class one since most poor Jamaican women leave 'the pickney with Miss Matty or Sister Lyn'.
Also, sometimes these children are held for the mother's work period in different homes because Miss Millie is too old to look after so many children. And while it is true that teenage mommy Kaneisha would keep a child or two with her little one, everybody in the district knows that she gets nothing from the irresponsible baby father and she would depend on Mary's baby feed to nourish her 'half starved pickney'.
All of this means that every Jamaican child should be nurtured from birth in a stimulating, enriching, loving and safe
environment.
MEN AND CHILD-REARING
Also, while 'paternity leave' has been seen as a 'sexy idea', there are very few societies in which men in general have accepted the notion that they should be equal partners in child rearing and caring. The best of men (the new metro-sexual type and a limited number of
recycled, pot-bellied 'dads') still boast about 'helping out the woman'.
It is about time that we realise that both working men and women should be given the needed support to balance work and family responsibilities so that women's lives are not determined by Mr. McDonald's
'biological imperative'.
These initiatives are but a few of the many game plans that women need to attend to in order to neutralise McDonald's predictions about men's plan to keep women in dark spaces by their insistence on the prerogative of the overrated patriarch.
Dr. Glenda P. Simms is a consultant and gender expert.
