Don’t buy male victim propaganda, says Johnson Smith

Government Senator Kamina Johnson Smith has rejected the emerging argument that men are being marginalised for the upward movement of women in Jamaica.

Much has been made especially of recent statistics published by the Statistical Institute of Jamaica (STATIN) showing that female workers are being employed at twice the rate of men.

However, speaking at The University of the West Indies Leaders Engaged, Activated, and Dedicated Annual Breakfast held at The Knutsford Court Hotel in New Kingston yesterday, Johnson Smith insisted that space has to be made for women who have been shackled by cultural norms.

“I don’t think promoting women in a situation where women have not been promoted before in a space that has been predominantly male, that it means male marginalisation.

“I am always quite surprised at how easy it is for conversations to change nowadays to male marginalisation when you are speaking about male empowerment,” Johnson Smith, one of the five women who sits in the 19-member Cabinet of the Andrew Holness administration, said.

She, too, referenced the recently published STATIN report, expressing alarm that the discussion has not shifted to more ‘people’ have been employed than ever before but instead has remained largely about the dramatic disparity in the figures showing women far outpacing men in finding jobs.

However, she pointed out that for more than three decades, female unemployment has been double that of male employment.

“So if you have a situation where you are closing your gap, where people are employed, but you are also empowering more women to close a distortion which has existed for decades, you are not marginalising men. You are making sure that you have a more equitable society.”

Continued Johnson Smith: “If it is you are living in a country where 45 per cent of your households are headed by women and they are 20 per cent poorer [than men], what you want to see is that you have more women employed so more households are less poor and affecting more positively a broader number of children and families. And that’s uplifting your society, not male marginalisation.”

That aside, the senator said there was need to examine how boys are being educated in school to ensure that dropout rates do not increase.

The UWI LEADS leadership breakfast was held under the theme ‘Reimagining Leadership: Going Against the Grain’.