International Women’s Day and some reflections on where we’re at

I’ve had my concerns lately, but still I wasn’t prepared for quite such a dire warning from the UN, as reported in The Guardian on March 6.

Global progress on women’s rights is “vanishing before our eyes”, the secretary general of the UN, António Guterres, has warned, saying the increasingly distant goal of gender equality will take another three centuries to achieve.

“Gender equality is growing more distant. On the current track, UN Women puts it 300 years away,” Guterres said in a general assembly speech ahead of International Women’s Day on 8 March, as he launched two weeks of discussions led by the Commission on the Status of Women.

“Women’s rights are being abused, threatened and violated around the world,” he added, as he ticked off a litany of crises: maternal mortality, girls ousted from school, caregivers denied work and children forced into early marriage.

“Progress won over decades is vanishing before our eyes,” Guterres said.

He highlighted the particularly dire conditions in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, where “women and girls have been erased from public life”.

300 years??!!! I hope he’s using hyperbole to some extent, but this is a very ominous warning. Right up there with the loss of our planet as we know it within this century, and we can see how seriously we’re taking that threat. The silence of sufficiently meaningful action is deafening.

Image source: Olle Johansson, Sweden, PoliticalCartoons.com
Earlier this week there was another sobering opinion piece in Toronto’s Globe and Mail that made me sit up and take notice. “Population decrease is irreversible. How will we manage the decline of humanity?”, by John Ibbitson and Darryl Bricker, describes the dramatic impending decrease in population in most countries around the world, with overall world population decrease projected to start mid-century. For countries that have already reached this point (Japan, South Korea, China, and Russia, to name a few), the concern starts to become: how do we continue to function as a society? How do the few young people support the many old people? How can we possibly imagine our societies as working differently than they do now? And what is the message for women and women’s role in this new world?

The irony is multifold. First of all, this world as we know it (those of us lucky enough to live in safe places) has only existed in its current form for the past 75 years or so. The basic model has been to embrace new technology – not a bad thing at all until we learn about what we’re doing to our planet – and base everything on “growth”. That’s growth of the economy and growth of profits for those who “have”. Sorry, folks, but we can’t continue to run our economies on the current model of encouraging people to buy things they don’t need with money they don’t have. We need to find a new model.

Secondly, until recently, the big issue – other than climate change – has been that there are too many people in the world. What were we going to do about that?! Well, it seems that we are taking care of that on our own, especially women, by having far fewer children (and having those fewer children far later in life). So now that the too-many-people issue may be about to resolve itself, the big concern is not having enough people. Of course, the only real issue with “down-sizing” is that until the bubble of old people die off (and, don’t worry, we will), there will be a challenge in staffing jobs and funding the social net for the old people. But this is a short-term issue, maybe 20 years or so, and then the population demographics should be back in balance. Figure it out, policy wonks.

And, thirdly, one of the solutions proposed to counter a decline in population, which speaks to the power of women, is to encourage women to have more children by paying them a monthly or annual stipend for additional children! Hungary’s proactive approach in this regard is featured in this article, but Quebec has tried something similar in the past, and most women readers will not be surprised to hear that these programs are not successful. All the governments are doing are paying families that already want to have more children. Sorry, male policy makers, but money is not an incentive to have more children. Few women are saying, “Gee, I’d love to have two or three more children if only I got another $800/month per kid.” From the Ibbitson/Bricker article:

To reverse four decades of population decline brought on by low fertility, outmigration and anti-immigrant policies, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government has greatly expanded financial supports for large families.

A woman with four children pays no income tax for life. There are also housing supports, child-care supports, SUV subsidies and other incentives. In January, the government unveiled a new program that would offer a lifetime income tax exemption for any woman who has a child in her 20s.

The program is hugely expensive: Five per cent of Hungary’s GDP goes to supporting families with children. And although the fertility rate ticked up in the past decade as the measures were introduced, last year it fell back from 1.6 to 1.5.

The most important reason, by far, not to emulate Hungary’s example is that it seeks to reverse decades of effort by women to achieve greater equality.

And this topic of having children brings me to the strong link with women’s rights and how they have improved for many of us, especially in the “western” world. I’m 77 years old. When I was a kid, the birth control pill had not yet been invented. Condoms were illegal; contraception was considered sinful for everyone by lawmakers. So having women die in childbirth after having 8 unplanned kids was considered not sinful, but being free to choose when and how many children to have so you could take proper care of them and yourself was. Blessedly, the birth control pill was successfully tested and approved in 1960 and by the mid-60s they were available to most women in most jurisdictions.

When I was a teenager, just before the availability of the pill, it was considered a nearly unrecoverable sin to have become pregnant “out of wedlock”. Parents in my neighbourhood whose kid “got in trouble” or who “got some girl in trouble” had to go completely silent about an occasion they usually had every right to rejoice in, the arrival of a grandchild. Instead, their kids disappeared and nobody ever spoke about where they were or whether they had a little boy or little girl. Certainly that has changed hugely for the better.

It is widely accepted now for women to have their own work lives and their own income. This makes them full partners in their relationships, which brings not only a level of independence but also an improved sense of self-worth. That’s got to be an improvement. And do you know what I believe really helped get women out of the home … the invention of permapress clothing! Anyone else my age will remember how much ironing our mothers had to do. It seemed like it never ended. Sheets needed to be ironed, all shirts, all pants, all nearly everything. The laundry came out of the wash wrinkled beyond belief. Every fridge had a green bottle in it that had water for sprinkling on the sheets and clothes before ironing to help get the wrinkles out; that, of course, was before some brilliant soul thought of having a steam function in irons. It’s kind of like ironing was the last of the household drudgery that had no end. Automatic washing machines arrived, and even dishwashers came in, along with vacuum cleaners (remember carpet sweepers, brooms, and dustpans?!), etc. But the ironing was never-ending until the advent of permapress cloth. Now we don’t even think about it. We’ve come a long way from when my mother-in-law had to drag a full tub of water across the floor and hoist it up on a wood stove to boil the water for her first child’s diapers!

Image source: Pinterest

On International Women’s Day we should applaud the positive changes, but we must also heed the warnings of António Guterres and continue to rail against the travesties being forced on women in countries such as Afghanistan and Iran. We should also rail against the continuing discrepancies in pay and opportunities between men and women in many occupations.

Folks, if you want your children to be taught by good, well-trained teachers, then you need to pay them.  If you want your parents – or you – to be taken care of by nurses and other caregivers in hospitals and long care homes, the majority of whom are women, then you need to pay them. You get what you pay for. Treat your staff well or you might end up getting nobody at all! Do we really believe that the people who handle our “wealth management” affairs are worth far more than the people who care for us physically and emotionally in our greatest hours of need? Do we really believe that the CEO of major corporations need to be making as much in the first morning of the New Year as the majority of his (it’s virtually always a man) employees make in an entire year?

On International Women’s Day, let’s all think about how we can continue to bring more equality into our societies. Women lift up the world.

Image source: Liza Donnelly, The New Yorker