Sunday March 8, 2020 ~ WEST SHORE, BC
by Mary P Brooke, Editor, West Shore Voice News
International Women’s Day brings to light how far women have come, but how far we’ve yet to go. There is still significant gender inequity embedded into our mainstream culture which sets women back for both social and financial opportunity; add that up lifelong and it’s a means to perpetuate relative poverty for women in Canada.
On the bright side, in Canada we are fortunate to have a federal government that supports the feminist agenda, and in BC the premier and gender equity parliamentary secretary are keen for improvements. Globally the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) this week repeated that women’s health is disadvantaged due to gender bias.
And this weekend watching the Real Time with Bill Maher political news analysis show Brian Cox (a lead actor in HBO’s Succession) commenting on earlier social conditions of ‘north Britain’ / Scotland, I was reminded of a comment closer to home by Island Health Chief Medical Health Officer Richard Stanwick who said during a public presentation in 2016 that women in Sooke die at a younger age than the BC average. Both Cox and Stanwick starkly said it’s essentially due to small-c conservative male-dominant values in a capitalist system by which a disproportionate number of men still get away with controlling the very fundamentals of women’s lives.
Providing quality affordable child care in BC is one of the most important contributions that the NDP government under Premier John Horgan has provided to improve the well-being of and socioeconomic opportunities for women (13,000 new spaces funded since July 2018).
When women are held back from full participation in the workforce they are incrementally set back: the job promotion not won, the old boys’ network party not invited to, possibly years out of the workforce or delayed post-secondary education due to financial restrictions or to raise children, divorce that propels women into a spiral of missed opportunities and income, and providing unpaid home care for children and aging parents… over a lifetime that leaves many senior women in precarious financial circumstances.
Let’s all mark March 8 on our calendars well ahead for next year, and be ready with our anecdotes about women in our modern world. In health, education, financial and job realms, and broader community leadership, there are moments of pride but also pockets of peril for women who seek to do their best but meet with barriers (intentional or systemic) that penalize women for being who they are.
We bear children! We nurture families and communities! We have the same wide range of talents and skills as men when participating in education and career opportunities. And most of the time, when in leadership, women bring a wider view of the human experience. This is to be celebrated, not sidelined.
And — somewhat in reverse — labelling women by gender first is actually a disservice to the whole person. We don’t need to use the ‘F-word’ (feminism) if that makes you squirm. Just look at talents, abilities, and contributions first, with gender as an incidental, and have zero-tolerance for patriarchal claims to dominance (many men and women still exercise internalized misogyny). With that framework in mind, the old boys’ network which still prevails in business and society (and many other things including disharmony in domestic relationships) will being to slip away.
===== NOTES:
This editorial was first published on page 2 in the March 6 to 9, 2020 weekend digest edition of West Shore Voice News