Gender researcher questions focus on marginalised males
IT may be fashionable these days to talk about the marginalisation of the Jamaican male.
But according to a local researcher on gender issues, such outcries are lop-sided and ignore the more fundamental problem: gross discrimination against Jamaican women.
“Women obviously require higher levels of educational qualifications to compete on equal footing with their male counterparts for jobs, equal remuneration and… power,” said Dr Barbara Bailey, regional co-ordinator for the Centre for Gender and Development Studies (CDGS) at the University of the West Indies (UWI).
Bailey last week addressed a women’s caucus at the annual conference of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association. Her central argument was that women have to study harder and work better but get paid less and are denied the top jobs and the centres of power: that the glass ceiling does exist.
In tone and substance, Bailey’s presentation was different to the issues that have been placed on the agenda recently by the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ) in a series of community seminars looking at the result of research on the performance of boys and the implications of sustainable development.
The PIOJ study in three parishes — Westmoreland, Kingston and St Catherine — showed that:
* boys had lower exam scores and attendance records;
* were more likely to be school dropouts; and
* there was a link between such performances and increasing deviant and even criminal behaviour of some adolescents and older males.
But in a passionate address to hundreds of mostly female delegates at the JTA conference, Dr Bailey insisted this constant talk about ‘male marginalisation’ was “incorrect” and “imbalanced”.
She called, for instance, for equal attention to be given to the inequalities and marginalisation of women in the labour market.
Bailey, citing a 1997 survey, noted that women are paid 83 per cent of what their male counterparts in the same profession earn and stressed that while women make up 40.9 per cent of the labour force, twice as many women as men are unemployed.
She said, the position of Jamaican women worsened when globalisation resulted in mergers, downsizing and layoffs. Labour force data show that in every year since 1999, women were the worst hit.
They accounted for 68 per cent of all redundancies in 1998, 62 per cent in 1999 and 66.9 per cent in 2000.
Bailey said that as a result of the contraction of the employed labour force, the number of self-employed persons more than tripled between 1991 and 1998. However, the number of persons who were unemployed because of failed businesses stood at just under 10,000 in 1998 and of that number, more than 74 per cent were women. In 1999, the figure was just over 10,000 persons, of whom 76 per cent were women, while in 2000 the number rose to 12,900 of which 8,400 or 65.1 per cent were women.
The inequalities and marginalisation of Caribbean women in the labour market have been addressed in regional and international conferences, Bailey pointed out.
The Economic Commission of Latin America and the Caribbean, and the World Bank, in separate studies found that in the Caribbean and Latin American region women need at least four more years of schooling than men in order to compete for the same jobs. They concluded that if women are to be economically independent and have earning power, they need to be well educated.
“In spite of what the international conferences are saying, the paradox is that increased participation and performance in education has not in any real way altered the position of the majority of women in the labour market,” Bailey said. “In fact, there is also a disparity of wages. And the statistics tell us that women on average earn only about 83 per cent of what men in this country earn.”
She blamed the inequalities on seven factors.
The first, Bailey said, is that “society has different expectations for males and females in terms of … formal certification”.
She argued that the under-achievement of men in the school system has not affected their participation in the labour market and their promotion to top-level positions in both the private and public sectors.
“Boys underachieve because intuitively they understand that they do not need to be as highly qualified as their sisters to get the job out there,” Bailey said.
She added: “I’m not saying that some boys are not in crisis, but I’m saying we are attacking the problem and diagnosing the problem incorrectly. We are seeing it as an educational problem why boys are not achieving when, in fact, it is a wider social problem and until the society sets the same standards for both men and women we will not get rid of the problem.”
A second factor causing female marginalisation, she said, was the general sex segregation in the workplace, caused by how women are socialised — at home, at school and the media — to think that certain behaviours, job positions, and even exam subjects, are for men only.
The third, she said, “is what we all very kindly call ‘The Old Boys Network’, because if men are in charge in the boardrooms, they are going to be looking out for other men”.
In most primary and secondary schools, for example, boards set up to govern the institutions consist of more men than women. Then there is general discrimination against women.
In a 1995 survey by the Jamaica Employers Federation and the CGDS, eight companies and 108 employees were surveyed and more women than men felt that they had been discriminated against.
The most common form of discrimination identified was men being promoted over women with equal or more qualifications. That study also showed that men with lower qualifications were concentrated in the top three job levels, while women with similar qualifications were concentrated in the bottom three levels of the organisations.
The fifth factor relates to how women perceive themselves.
“We are socialised as women to fear success, to lack confidence, to feel that we can’t take risk, to be very loyal to a group and so we don’t have this dog-eat-dog attitude,” Bailey said.
“Often we are the same ones who will elect or vote the male person in as leader so we are our own worst enemies because we feel that we don’t have the skills to take on leadership positions.”
Bailey’s views won support from school principals later.
“We have a concept that man must lead and we don’t stop to see the implications that it has had now on we the women,” said Sonia Knowles, principal of Refuge Primary School in Trelawny. Her school board has six members, including two women, and is headed by a male.
“It is we, the women, who put them there,” Knowles said.
The JTA, one of the first trade unions in Jamaica, has at least a 70 per cent female membership and a history of men as presidents. But in recent years it sought to address the imbalance by nearly always alternating a man with a woman in its leadership every year.
This was the purpose of the women’s caucus, said Eric Downie, a former JTA president who still serves on the executive council.
“This caucus to let the women assert their rightful position (especially) that the majority of teachers are women and it’s a direct decision of the association to let the men ease off a bit and be supportive and let the ladies assert themselves,” he said.
Bailey called for a change in the way girls are socialised in the home and school. She believes girls should be encouraged to seek positions of leadership. Their insecurities must be erased and they should not fear success or be worried about competing with men, she said.
She suggested that the JTA begin to tackle the problem in their in-service teacher training workshops. She said a recent Caricom project in collaboration with the centre, developed a book for teacher education called Gender Issues in Caribbean Education. The book’s four modules seek to improve the effectiveness of educational institutions in Jamaica and the wider Caribbean.