Now a days
you find a lot of talk about ‘gender’; ‘Gender equality or Equity?’ is an often
stated question. Lots of NGOs or CSOs us it to get in the picture or to get
funds for projects. But what exactly do they mean by ‘Gender’? Is it ‘girl
power’ of a new word for ‘empowered feminism’?
If we look
on the internet on what ‘Gender’ is we come to the conclusion that there is not
one definite definition but it is always described like; the relationship or
ideas that people have about standard roles for women and men in a certain
cultural situation. In most cases this is translated to inequality to woman as
part of a society. The simple explanation for this inequality of women is that
most societies in the world are patriarchy, this means that they are based on
the man as most important and there for powerful in social structures. There
are not many matriarchies in the world; at least we can say that there is no
country with a matriarchy as national structure. Although within countries we
have cultures that are organized through a matriarchic structure.
As most
cultures are patriarch we concentrate on women empowerment as we talk about ‘Gender’;
that is clear and rightfully true as they are the group of people that are most
likely to be suppressed or left out. The way we concentrate on this fact is a
bit of my concern. In discussions about ‘Gender inequality’ or ‘Gender issues’
I always feel I have to protect the man. It is always about the women having to
become strong and independed and for me that sounds like eighties feminism. I
belief we have to work on womens right but we also should be careful about
impacting too much on cultural balances. If we only concentrate on female
empowerment, we might lose the guys and make the inequality only bigger. I am
afraid that most programmes designed to let women know about their basic human
right forget about informing the men about that same issue. In this way situations
of domestic violence can even get worse by doing female empowerment.
This
weekend I have had the most interesting discussion with one of my fellow
volunteers here in Nigeria on this issue. She works for GPI, a NGO specialized
in girl empowerment, in Calabar. They have a training center for girls to train
them every Sunday on human rights, self-esteem, HIV/Aids, personal presentation
and all sorts of good things that girls in the Nigeria context do not learn ‘just
like that’. When I heard about it I got really interested in the lessons and
group of girls. So in the afternoon I was invited to come to a pick-nick and
most of the women at the pick-nick were graduated from GPI. You could feel
that, even as a group of women together they were more self-conscious then I
have ever experienced in Nigeria. Most of the time women, especially in the
north but also in the south, are working hard to please their surroundings. These
women were just enjoying and saying whatever they felt like. I think it was the
atmosphere that struck me the most. It struck me in positive way and with a lot
of question marks. Most question marks were about how do the boys ‘handle’
these girls? How do teachers coop with pupils like this? Because they are not
prepared to work with girls like this. Is GPI not enlarging the risk for the
girl to be beaten by men and teachers.
I think that
with these lessons also boys and teachers and other key-persons is societies
should be trained to learn to coop with the change. I am afraid that now the
gap will only increase and the situation for the girl will get worse and they
will choose not to be bothered by equality.
I put this
on the table during the discussion with my colleague volunteer and she agreed
and she told me GPI is recognizing this problem, but is unable to do anything
about it because funders don’t want to fund programmes for boys. It seems to be
really hard to get money for sensitization of boys on gender issues.
So are we
really letting these girls go through what the first feminists went through are
do we acknowledge that gender is about both, men and women?
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