Orville Taylor | Celebrate our women

We really are not doing too badly as a country and despite having the highest homicide rate of English-speaking democracies, there is a lot of progress in equality and transparency. We have had three female speakers of the House of Representatives.

Last Friday was International Women’s Day, and we are counting our blessings, inasmuch as they are far more than the votes cast in the last local government elections.

The dust is settling and members of the parish councils have been sworn in, while others who lost, are swearing in language not fit for publication.

There is another two years before the next general election. So, we must assess where we are and the way forward.

It might surprise you. But for the large part of our modern history, since we started voting in elections, the idea of women being equal to men was missing from our Constitution.

Prior to the Charter of Rights, there was no freedom from discrimination based on sex. By the way, this does not equate to gender, gender identification or sexual orientation. As our Charter now provides since 2011, it is strictly about whether one has male or female reproductive organs.

It is not a question, however, of deliberate discrimination against women. After all, by the time Jamaica became independent, we had already signed the important conventions of the International Labour Organization (ILO). Therefore, we were bound by the fundamental human rights treaties, which outlaw discrimination based on sex, among other criteria.

Two important pieces of legislation from the colonial period would have been inconsistent with a Constitution that guaranteed equal treatment across the sexes. The old Maintenance Act placed at the time a greater burden on the males as regards familial responsibility.

Second, the old night work law was ostensibly designed to protect women from the vagaries of working between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.

Had there been a section in the Constitution which dictated fully equal treatment for males and females, then the kind of privileging that women would have experienced under these statutes would have been impossible.

OBVIOUS GAP

Notwithstanding the obvious gap between ILO convention and the then Constitution, Jamaica ratified convention 100 and the convention 111, which deal with equal remuneration and discrimination in employment and occupation, respectively.

Having completed this ratification in 1975, Jamaica swiftly passed the Employment (Equal Pay for Men and Women) Act in the same year. Under this statute, men and women who do essentially the same work should be paid equally.

While an important development, the ILO has long recognised that the act falls short; because it focuses on equal work, and not work of equal value.

For those activists who believe that females and males should be paid the same salary for doing the same work, it should be recognised that using a strict model of supply and demand, based on market forces it is easy to argue that given the lower demand for female sport personnel, women, such as footballers and cricketers, simply do not draw enough economic activity to justify equal pay.

However, in real terms, there is still a gap in the way in which we treat female labour organisationally, because despite improvements in the labour market and legislation, female work of equal value still lags behind in terms of remuneration.

On the whole, female unemployment can be as high as twice that of males, depending on the age cohort in this country.

Yet, there is a conceptual problem of measurement. First of all, women’s economic activity tends to be simply undervalued.

Female domestic workers are paid lower than males. Never mind the fact that gardening and landscaping are arduous tasks. In the larger scheme of things, a dirty house or laundry is more likely to kill you than leaves on the lawn. Not to mention nannies, who care for your most precious.

NOT MONETISE

Similarly, women themselves tend to not monetise their activity and call it work.

Still, as we assess how we have done with gender equality, we can boast of having elected a woman to Parliament in our first election under universal suffrage in 1944.

Madam Rose Leon was the first female member of the cabinet. At present, almost 30 per cent of our legislators are women. This is slightly more than the 29 per cent in the US.

Coming out of these municipal elections, the numbers are not impressive, but the county of Cornwall has five women, who seem very energised.

Jamaica has had a female mayor of the city of Kingston. Female custodes and a long-serving chief justice.

At last count, the majority of our senior judges are women. As with the rest of the university populations, law students are biased at a sex ratio close to the 70:30.

Whatever one might feel about the Director of Public Prosecutions, she has distinguished herself and left an indelible mark.

Customs has had at least three female commissioners. Corrections at least three and the police have had two female Deputy Commissioners.

In the one year a female headed the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies, we saw the best of the institution.

Now, we have a female heading the third largest Anglophone military in the hemisphere.

With the first female head of the Jamaica Civil Service Association, Techa Clarke Griffiths joins Helene Davis Whyte as premier union leaders.

But let us acknowledge Arleen McBean, who is showing sheer guts in standing up for the police federation, during the unjustified victimisation of chairman, Rohan James.

We might have forgotten, but Novelette Grant was the first woman to lead the Police Officers Association. Remember also Leonie Smythe Melhado, of blessed memory, who led the Special Constabulary Force Association.

Let us celebrate our women. Truth is though, we have more milestones. But we haven’t done badly.

Dr Orville Taylor is senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com