The book with the bright magenta cover
Gender Dimensions of the Millennium Developmebt Goals in Sri Lanka
I was one of three speakers at the launch of the UNDP’s “Gender Dimensions of the Millennium Development Goals in Sri Lanka” volume. The publication was researched and written by a team from CENWOR (Centre for Women’s Research http://www.cenwor.lk/). The other two speakers were Dr Anila Dias Bandaranaike, former Director of Statistics and Assistant Governor at the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, and Dr Pat Alailima, a former Director General of Planning. Distinguished company. My remit was to talk about Goals 3 and 7 in all of 10 minutes – so here, not quite verbatim, is what I said.
I began by congratulating the writers, researchers and compilers of the report. [Though I didn’t say it, I did think while I was reading it “trust the women to be realistic rather than euphoric about Sri Lanka’s much lauded social indicators and gender equality achievements”!] I also congratulated the UNDP for putting out an eye-catching and attractive document – a bright magenta cover with black and white male/female symbols – because as a communications specialist I know that the “attractiveness” of a document cannot be underplayed. About three people who saw the document on my desk in the run up to the event picked it up and leafed through it.
I also mentioned that the last time I was invited to talk about the MDGs (see January 4, post in this blog) I stressed the need to go beyond the numbers that we are using as targets and indicators and to ask the question WHY? things are the way they are. I was pleased that that in this document CENWOR has gone a long way to doing that, though I suspect that there is a lot more valid, qualitative knowledge within CENWOR that has still not found its way into the report and that there are still some “why” questions that remain unanswered.
I took each goal separately, and tried to raise some of my own WHY questions that I thought were important and that were not yet fully answered.
Goal 3 : promoting gender equality and empowering women
There are four indicators for this goal, and the Report suggests, and I agree, that the indicators that are proposed do not capture the different facets of this goal. The report goes on to provide a fuller analysis of gender equality from a rights perspective. This analysis raises (at least) three issues that I think we need to consider:
Issue 1: Women in the plantation sector
One, is the issue of the empowerment of women in the plantation sector. A lot has been talked about these women over the years, but formidable gaps in their empowerment remain. The report tells us that while the national gender literacy gap is closing it is still high for the plantation sector, and that in the plantation sector, even though women form a large proportion of the employed workforce, they have no control over their income (This is in contrast to other sectors where women also form a large proportion of the workforce, such as workers in the apparel industry, and migrant workers, where women have more control over their earnings). WHY does this situation prevail?
Issue 2: Low participation in the labour force
Two, is the issue of low levels of labour force participation. I have heard it argued that this is a matter of choice, and that having educated mothers outside the labour force, has positive impacts on the children such as better nutrition. In the first instance, it is not clear to me that it is a matter of choice, given that the unemployment rate for women is double that of men, and as such there is no incentive for women seeking employment. A recent study by Dileni Gunewardene, of the University of Peradeniya, has shown that there are also significant wage gaps between women and men in both the private and public sectors – which could be another disincentive.
I am more inclined to go with what the authors of this report say - “many women have been unable clearly to translate what they hae pereceived to be educational achievements into economic gains”. Here is a WHY question that requires more exploration, WHY are women not participating in the labour force?
Issue 3: Low participation in decision-making
This is an indicator that as Sri Lankans I think we should be ashamed of, and which at one level negates all our so called “gender parity” achievements. Representation in Parliament was down to 4.9% in 2004 from 5.3% in 1994 and at the Provincial Council and Municipal Council level women comprise only 3% of the councillors. At the Pradeshiya Sabha it is only 2%. There are no statistics in this report about women’s participation at the decision making levels of the trade unions, especially in the context of what I said before, in the plantation workers’ trade unions.
I think we also should look at the regional statistics for some sort of comparision.
In Pakistan there is a quota of 21.6% of parliamentary seats for women.
In Nepal, there is a quota of 5% for both lower and upper houses of parliament, and 20% at the local level
And India women form 8.1% of the national representatives, and 33% of the local representatives.
Bangladesh has just 2% of women representatives which places them in a worse situtation than Sri Lanka.
If our educational achievements haven’t translated into economic gains, they certainly haven’t translated into political gains, and here again I see a big WHY question that this report has not explored but which needs to be investigated. My own hypothesis is that the increasing violence in the political system mitigates against women’s participation, but CENWOR is excruciatingly silent on this issue. If the silence is due to the lack of evidence, I believe it is a hypothesis worth exploring further. WHY are women not participating in the political decision making? Is increasing violence a reason?
Goal 7: Ensure Environmental sustainability
I am not an environmentalist, so my ability to critique this section of the report was limited, even though I felt that the gender issues were not explored sufficiently when it came to bio-diversity. I would have welcomed a brief discussion on the issues of household energy and the impact of indoor air pollution, a close look women’s vulnerability to changes in the environment and greater recognition for the type of environmental management that women carry out as a part of their day to day domestic (in gender analytical terms, reproductive) responsibilities.
My main comment however was inspired by a meeting I had been to the day before the UNDP/CENWOR event. Practical Action (http://practicalaction.org/?id=region_south_asia)and the Sustainable Energy Authority of Sri Lanka (http://www.energy.gov.lk/) organised a workshop on “Achieving Sustainability and Equity in Energy:Policy Choices for the Future” http://practicalaction.org/?id=region_south_asia_energyconference_30012008.
It was a very exciting event, but there were very few women in the audience, the gender dimensions in the discussion were almost completely absent and my attempts to raise gender issues were not very successful. It struck me that the ‘gender community’ needs to engage at this level much more.
The workshop stressed that integrating principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes was not just about reversing the loss of environmental resources, but also bout ensuring that our energy and transport polices and our construction methods etc are sustainable. We discussed the imminent end of the fossil fuel era and the imperative to switch to other sources of energy. We also talked about the need to make a lifestyle shift from aspiraing to a lifestyle that leads to unrestricted growth to one that leads to a more sustainable growth scenario- which involves some people reducing their energy intensive lifestyle to enable others to improve. The MDG discourse, the gender discourse, and the MDG and gender discourse, needs to take these issues into account, at both the macro and micro levels. More particularly, from a gender perspective for Goal 7, we need to explore the gender dimensions of government support to energy production and distribution, and the opportunities (e.g. for employment) or threats (e.g. to food security). The MDGs also don’t talk about climate change, because at the time of formulating the MDGs the world was in denial of the potential impacts of climate change. Now that we’ve woken up to possible impacts, it is important for us to begin to think about the gender implications of adaptation.
I was one of three speakers at the launch of the UNDP’s “Gender Dimensions of the Millennium Development Goals in Sri Lanka” volume. The publication was researched and written by a team from CENWOR (Centre for Women’s Research http://www.cenwor.lk/). The other two speakers were Dr Anila Dias Bandaranaike, former Director of Statistics and Assistant Governor at the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, and Dr Pat Alailima, a former Director General of Planning. Distinguished company. My remit was to talk about Goals 3 and 7 in all of 10 minutes – so here, not quite verbatim, is what I said.
I began by congratulating the writers, researchers and compilers of the report. [Though I didn’t say it, I did think while I was reading it “trust the women to be realistic rather than euphoric about Sri Lanka’s much lauded social indicators and gender equality achievements”!] I also congratulated the UNDP for putting out an eye-catching and attractive document – a bright magenta cover with black and white male/female symbols – because as a communications specialist I know that the “attractiveness” of a document cannot be underplayed. About three people who saw the document on my desk in the run up to the event picked it up and leafed through it.
I also mentioned that the last time I was invited to talk about the MDGs (see January 4, post in this blog) I stressed the need to go beyond the numbers that we are using as targets and indicators and to ask the question WHY? things are the way they are. I was pleased that that in this document CENWOR has gone a long way to doing that, though I suspect that there is a lot more valid, qualitative knowledge within CENWOR that has still not found its way into the report and that there are still some “why” questions that remain unanswered.
I took each goal separately, and tried to raise some of my own WHY questions that I thought were important and that were not yet fully answered.
Goal 3 : promoting gender equality and empowering women
There are four indicators for this goal, and the Report suggests, and I agree, that the indicators that are proposed do not capture the different facets of this goal. The report goes on to provide a fuller analysis of gender equality from a rights perspective. This analysis raises (at least) three issues that I think we need to consider:
Issue 1: Women in the plantation sector
One, is the issue of the empowerment of women in the plantation sector. A lot has been talked about these women over the years, but formidable gaps in their empowerment remain. The report tells us that while the national gender literacy gap is closing it is still high for the plantation sector, and that in the plantation sector, even though women form a large proportion of the employed workforce, they have no control over their income (This is in contrast to other sectors where women also form a large proportion of the workforce, such as workers in the apparel industry, and migrant workers, where women have more control over their earnings). WHY does this situation prevail?
Issue 2: Low participation in the labour force
Two, is the issue of low levels of labour force participation. I have heard it argued that this is a matter of choice, and that having educated mothers outside the labour force, has positive impacts on the children such as better nutrition. In the first instance, it is not clear to me that it is a matter of choice, given that the unemployment rate for women is double that of men, and as such there is no incentive for women seeking employment. A recent study by Dileni Gunewardene, of the University of Peradeniya, has shown that there are also significant wage gaps between women and men in both the private and public sectors – which could be another disincentive.
I am more inclined to go with what the authors of this report say - “many women have been unable clearly to translate what they hae pereceived to be educational achievements into economic gains”. Here is a WHY question that requires more exploration, WHY are women not participating in the labour force?
Issue 3: Low participation in decision-making
This is an indicator that as Sri Lankans I think we should be ashamed of, and which at one level negates all our so called “gender parity” achievements. Representation in Parliament was down to 4.9% in 2004 from 5.3% in 1994 and at the Provincial Council and Municipal Council level women comprise only 3% of the councillors. At the Pradeshiya Sabha it is only 2%. There are no statistics in this report about women’s participation at the decision making levels of the trade unions, especially in the context of what I said before, in the plantation workers’ trade unions.
I think we also should look at the regional statistics for some sort of comparision.
In Pakistan there is a quota of 21.6% of parliamentary seats for women.
In Nepal, there is a quota of 5% for both lower and upper houses of parliament, and 20% at the local level
And India women form 8.1% of the national representatives, and 33% of the local representatives.
Bangladesh has just 2% of women representatives which places them in a worse situtation than Sri Lanka.
If our educational achievements haven’t translated into economic gains, they certainly haven’t translated into political gains, and here again I see a big WHY question that this report has not explored but which needs to be investigated. My own hypothesis is that the increasing violence in the political system mitigates against women’s participation, but CENWOR is excruciatingly silent on this issue. If the silence is due to the lack of evidence, I believe it is a hypothesis worth exploring further. WHY are women not participating in the political decision making? Is increasing violence a reason?
Goal 7: Ensure Environmental sustainability
I am not an environmentalist, so my ability to critique this section of the report was limited, even though I felt that the gender issues were not explored sufficiently when it came to bio-diversity. I would have welcomed a brief discussion on the issues of household energy and the impact of indoor air pollution, a close look women’s vulnerability to changes in the environment and greater recognition for the type of environmental management that women carry out as a part of their day to day domestic (in gender analytical terms, reproductive) responsibilities.
My main comment however was inspired by a meeting I had been to the day before the UNDP/CENWOR event. Practical Action (http://practicalaction.org/?id=region_south_asia)and the Sustainable Energy Authority of Sri Lanka (http://www.energy.gov.lk/) organised a workshop on “Achieving Sustainability and Equity in Energy:Policy Choices for the Future” http://practicalaction.org/?id=region_south_asia_energyconference_30012008.
It was a very exciting event, but there were very few women in the audience, the gender dimensions in the discussion were almost completely absent and my attempts to raise gender issues were not very successful. It struck me that the ‘gender community’ needs to engage at this level much more.
The workshop stressed that integrating principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes was not just about reversing the loss of environmental resources, but also bout ensuring that our energy and transport polices and our construction methods etc are sustainable. We discussed the imminent end of the fossil fuel era and the imperative to switch to other sources of energy. We also talked about the need to make a lifestyle shift from aspiraing to a lifestyle that leads to unrestricted growth to one that leads to a more sustainable growth scenario- which involves some people reducing their energy intensive lifestyle to enable others to improve. The MDG discourse, the gender discourse, and the MDG and gender discourse, needs to take these issues into account, at both the macro and micro levels. More particularly, from a gender perspective for Goal 7, we need to explore the gender dimensions of government support to energy production and distribution, and the opportunities (e.g. for employment) or threats (e.g. to food security). The MDGs also don’t talk about climate change, because at the time of formulating the MDGs the world was in denial of the potential impacts of climate change. Now that we’ve woken up to possible impacts, it is important for us to begin to think about the gender implications of adaptation.
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