The meaning of Gender Equality

EDITOR: I believe that Gender Equality is one of the most important causes of our times and everyone should have an understanding of it. As a nation, we have made considerable progress with respect to the empowerment of women over the years as reflected in a higher percentage of female participation in the workforce, a greater number of powerful and influential women in high-end careers and a number of other indicators. In fact, many disciplines or fields of human endeavour such as medicine are right now dominated outright by women who are doing a great job of saving lives. This has been buttressed and supported by sensible changes to our laws which improve the condition of women with respect to maternity leave and other issues that have a bearing on gender equality and the empowerment of women.

For me, one of the most significant and consequential changes that took place over the years that left a strong impression on my mind and made a practical difference for many women and girls has to do with the opportunity for female students who become pregnant to go back to school after childbirth. The system of childcare was also enhanced or upgraded for the benefit of women and we made progress in a number of other areas. However, we are still grappling with areas of a woman’s general sense of safety and security, sexual and gender-based violence, the burden of maintenance and childcare and other matters. For me, gender equality is about ensuring that men and women are treated fairly and experience no discrimination on the grounds of gender. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake for anyone to think that gender equality is based on the presumption that men and women are the same- that is simply not true as should be obvious from biology and prison statistics.

We have to see gender equality as being about equality of opportunity and not equality of outcomes. Equality of opportunity is eminently desirable for individuals and society.

However, equality of outcomes is an entirely different matter. I will illustrate my point. We should have a society in which any woman who wants to become an engineer can make that career choice. Equally, we should have a society where every man who wants to become a nurse can make that career choice. This is basically the case in the countries of Scandinavia

(Denmark, Norway and Sweden), which are considered to be the highest-ranking countries in terms of gender equality.

However,notwithstanding this fact, the ratio of male to female engineers is something like 20:1. Similarly, the ratio of female to male nurses is also something like 20:1. The moral of this story is that if there is equality of opportunity and men and women are able to exercise free choice, they will choose different things. We will not get equal outcomes. We must keep this in mind. Nonetheless, we must seek to ensure that we have a society in which men and women are treated fairly. The emphasis must be on equality of opportunity and fairness.

I look forward to us making more progress with respect to gender equality in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

 Luke Browne