Equal and fair

A headline I came across in a netsearch read: “AA: white women benefit most”. First I thought AA was Alcoholics Anonymous, or the Automobile Association. Only then I came to realise it really had to do with affirmative action.

So white women benefit most from affirmative action, obtain job promotions and salary adjustments, even though other reports tell us that in many fields they are still paid less than men.

From a family-friendly angle how does one react to these kind of statements? Part of me says, great, progress, women are reaching upwards towards achieving their potential! But what potential? Intellectual, career potential or womanly potential? Are women becoming just like men in their choice of careers and job expectations?

For many women on their own and especially those with children, their job or career is essential. Most married women are co-breadwinners, and their income is also indispensable.

But I believe some other questions should be asked. Firstly is women’s empowerment in the workplace putting too great a strain on their family commitments? Secondly are career, job or work decisions and choices taking precedence over family needs? Thirdly what is their effect on the roles of men and women, boys and girls in their families? Fourthly, whose problem is it? Surely women have equal rights with men to have a job, own, run and manage businesses, even farms, or build a family.

With the family life theme for August, “Love is fair to boys and girls” in mind, there is still another aspect to consider. “Is empowering girl children in fact disempowering boy children?”

“Take a girl child to work day” is a bright idea, but does anyone take a boy child to work to give him too an idea of his career opportunities? And the girls who are most disadvantaged are hardly likely to be the ones to be taken to work. They are the ones back home in shacks and rural villages, who do not know that they have equal rights with boys. And, if they do know, they have little chance of experiencing those rights. They are running households, caring for siblings, may have been forced to drop out of school.

They are the ones who are acquiring other important skills that their more affluent contemporaries don’t have. How many white girls know how to run a household, cook and clean, let alone sew and knit? How many are able to nurse a sick or dying mother? Is that not humanly empowering or is that lowly-valued work, even maybe regarded as a form of slave labour?

“Love is fair to boys and girls.” Fair, to a point, means equal. It means equal treatment and equal empowerment, not advantaging one gender above the other. To me it means getting the boys too to knuckle down to some of the housework, as admittedly some already do.

It also means encouraging all of them, helping them to develop a strong gender identity. Let boys be boys and girls be girls. Let them do boy things, or girl things, ideally and hopefully with their fathers and mothers. But let them be who they are. Sure, let them become successful in the work place—but not at the expense of being successful in their personal relationships as future spouses and moms and dads.

Do females also benefit from those other forms of AA? I believe that as a result of the increased pressures on them, a growing number of women, whites and others, are becoming addicted to alcohol. AA’s brochure on women and alcohol states that women alcoholics sometimes carry a greater burden than men, because society is more tolerant of male drinkers than of female drinkers. Being more directly involved with families and children also accentuates the problem.

As for the Automobile Association my daughter and I both have personal experience of benefiting from some of their services, but I don’t really believe that to be particularly gender-related. Modern-day guys are probably not much more mechanically minded car-wise then the girls.

Cars are totally genderblind and will break down equally perversely in the hands of a male or female owner.