The author is among the many millions who have seen multitudes of women on television ranging from leaders of countries to ministers. chief medical officers, nurses and researchers working tirelessly to combat the pandemic and attend to patients.
by Dr. Ruwantissa Abeyratne in Montreal
It's not a women's issue… but a caregiving issue, and to move forward toward real equality, we not only need a “men's movement” where caregiving is respected and valued, but also women have to shed their preconceptions about masculinity ~ Anne-Marie Slaughter
The 8th of March every year heralds International Women’s Day and this year’s theme is ‘Women in leadership: Achieving an equal future in a Covid-19 world’. It is not clear why the leadership of women has necessarily been narrowly linked with women’s role in a world riddled with the pandemic and why their leadership should not be considered irrespective of any special circumstances. The progenitor of this designation – The United Nations - says that March 8th this year celebrates “the tremendous efforts by women and girls around the world in shaping a more equal future and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic”. It is not made entirely clear how “shaping a more equal future” (which in and of itself is an oxymoron as something that is equal cannot be more equal) has been brought to bear by women.
The United Nations vindicates itself somewhat by mitigating its generic claim by saying: “ It is also aligned with the priority theme of the 65th session of the Commission on the Status of Women, Women in public life, equal participation in decision making, and the flagship Generation Equality campaign, which calls for women’s right to decision-making in all areas of life, equal pay, equal sharing of unpaid care and domestic work, an end all forms of violence against women and girls, and health-care services that respond to their needs”. So much for that.
The author is among the many millions who have seen multitudes of women on television ranging from leaders of countries to ministers. chief medical officers, nurses and researchers working tirelessly to combat the pandemic and attend to patients. This makes the leadership of women a moot point when it comes to the pandemic and health care. Another incontrovertible fact is that women are generally equal to men in every respect and even better in some respects. Famed behavioral biology professor Melvin Konner has said “[W]omen are fundamentally pragmatic as well as caring, cooperative as well as competitive, skilled in getting their own egos out of the way, deft in managing people without putting them on the defensive, builders not destroyers. Women’s superiority in judgment, their trustworthiness, reliability, fairness, working and playing well with others, relative freedom from distracting sexual impulses, and lower levels of prejudice, bigotry, and violence.
Harvard Business Review (HBR) in its issue of June 26, 2020 carries an article titled Will the Pandemic Reshape Notions of Female Leadership? by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Avivah Wittenberg-Cox. The authors say: “Countries with women in leadership have suffered six times fewer confirmed deaths from Covid-19 than countries with governments led by men. Unsurprisingly, the media has swelled with stories of their pragmatism, prowess — and humanity. Will these positive outcomes influence our collective readiness to elect and promote more women into power?” They go on to say: “There are not (yet) enough women running countries to legitimately examine gender effects. Women only govern 18 countries or 545 million people globally. That is 7% of the world’s population — an achievement, nonetheless statistically insignificant”.
These definitive criteria put women squarely ahead of men in terms of their competence and eligibility to play leadership roles in society and it is a social enigma that women should be ascribed a day of the year where they are encouraged and verbally empowered with patronizing empathy. The blanket emollient of the United Nations cited above, particularly in its final part, hints at grave social injustices perpetrated against women
As Sunday Observer’s Editorial of 7 March reports: “ No country has, however, achieved gender equality. Legal restrictions have kept 2.7 billion women from accessing the same choice of jobs as men. Less than 25 percent of parliamentarians were women, as of 2019. One in three women experience gender-based violence, still. A gender pay gap persists across the globe - women earn 23 percent less than men and nearly 60 percent of women around the world work in the informal economy, earning less, saving less, and at greater risk of falling into poverty.
Women are still not present in equal numbers in business or politics. According to the World Economic Forum, the gender gap won’t close until 2186. In 2019, women effectively worked ‘for free’ from November 14 until the end of the year because of the gender pay gap”.
Turning to the United Nations, one finds that the philosophy of International Women’s Day rests primarily on the perceived economic, financial, and professional value that women bring to society which is marginalized by a contrived gender gap. This might well be the case, but this is not the end of the story. There are also the psychological, social, and historical dimensions.
All these three dimensions rest on the unique role played by women as caregivers, which carry implications for equality of opportunity and recognition. Anne-Marie Slaughter, a professor at Princeton University and CEO of The New America Foundation , in an article in The Atlantic titled Why Women Still Can’t Have it All has said: “If you are a woman without caregiving responsibilities, there is very little that is going to hold you back…There is still discrimination out there, there is still sexism out there, yes, but by and large (and the statistics bear this out), women without caregiving responsibilities are doing better than men in high school and college and better than men going into the job market. They are ascending rapidly — as long as they are allowed to focus entirely on their careers.”
Looking back at early human society, historian Yuval Noah Harari in his celebrated book Sapiens refers to various theories of male domination over women citing social rules that varied widely across societies and time periods, where “nearly all human societies since the Agricultural Revolution have been patriarchal—they tend to place men at the top of their social hierarchies”. Harari refers to “many theories suggesting that men are biologically superior to women” among which is one theory which suggests that men are physically stronger, and they used their physical power to suppress women. The innate tendency of men to be more violent and aggressive has also been a theory that has percolated from early periods of human history. “Yet another theory suggests that biological differences (such as childbearing) made women evolve to be dependent on men to survive”. Needless to say, Harari disagrees with all these trends.
Simone de Beauvoir, in her book The Second Sex, posits the fact that “men fundamentally oppress women by characterizing them, on every level, as the Other, defined exclusively in opposition to men. Man occupies the role of the self, or subject; woman is the object, the other. He is essential, absolute, and transcendent. She is inessential, incomplete, and mutilated. He extends out into the world to impose his will on it, whereas woman is doomed to immanence, or inwardness. He creates, acts, invents; she waits for him to save her”. This distinction is the foundation of the overall thesis of de Beauvoir of exploitation of women.
After explaining how male superiority in society developed from ancient times - from nomadic hunter-gatherers through the French Revolution and contemporary times, where female subservience and inferiority were forced on the women through the exploitation of their physical frailty and vulnerability de Beauvoir credibly explains how myths have been concocted along the lines of male superiority, effectively depriving women of opportunity and relegating them to the background of ignominy. Implicit in Anne-Marie Slaughter’s presentation of the “caregiver” theory is this stark fact.
Whether it be in under employment or under pay, sexual abuse or other forms of exploitation or subjugation, it might be time to cease the patronizing of women by offering them “equality” in numbers of employment or parity of wages. These are of course necessary to right wrongs. But a deeper appreciation of recognition should not be shrouded in what appears on the surface.
This is the alternate reality.
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