http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2013\05\26\story_26-5-2013_pg3_6
Sunday, May 26, 2013
VIEW : Harnessing women’s power — Saad Hafiz
Political parties should promote and ensure greater inclusion of women in
decision-making and leadership positions
Between gushing tributes to the ‘all-weather’ friendship between Pakistan and
China, Prime Minister Li Keqiang could have highlighted the contribution of
women to China’s rise as a world power to his Pakistani hosts. Pakistan can
learn from the great strides that China has made in terms of women’s
empowerment. In sharp contrast to Pakistan, China boasts a high female literacy
rate and a rapidly closing gap between estimated female to male earned income.
Chinese women seem to have overcome the usual obstacles of finding work,
getting an education and are being freed of restrictive traditions faced by the
women in many developing economies. During the Ming-Qing era when the country
witnessed a rapid expansion of commerce, the Chinese discovered very early that
empowering women is smart economics. In that era, both men and women (who often
brought their own funds into their husbands’ households) participated in
village-level economic life. Pakistan may also find it to be smart economics to
permit women to make a larger contribution to national economic life and wealth
creation. This would be possible if women were allowed to be part of the
workforce in greater numbers. But for that to happen, society will have to lift
the many burdens that weigh down women and prevent them from contributing to
the economy.
China has also made substantial progress in widening women’s political
participation though the level of which continues to rank lower than that in
many other countries, especially those in the democratic west. To achieve
equality for women in the male dominated Chinese society has not been an easy
task. A key turning point was China’s hosting of the Fourth World Conference on
Women in Beijing in 1995, which served as a catalyst in boosting women’s
political involvement through various gender-oriented regulations. In
comparison, the political participation of women in Pakistan while high in
comparison to other Islamic countries continues to be bedeviled by tokenism and
the biwi-beti (wife-daughter) brigade. Traditionally, many female candidates
have been from wealthy, land-owning families and were seen more as a
continuation of political dynasties than as women entering politics in their
own right. Moreover, since very few women politicians have an independent
electoral base, the uncertainty about where they will be fielded in
directly-contested seats make them even more dependent on male bosses of their
party to win elections. This has enlarged the compass of the ideology of female
subservience, which is most prominent in the domestic realm, into the public
and political domain as well. While the reserved quota for women seats ensures
that the women’s representation in Pakistan’s parliament is the highest in
South Asia, this is not true representation as women politicians actually enjoy
limited political power and influence overall. Merely three percent of directly
elected seats are held by women in the National and the Provincial assemblies.
Moreover, there are reportedly 11 million fewer women registered as voters than
men in the electoral rolls. Women from poorer families remain excluded from the
political system and, at the far end of the spectrum many women are so
disenfranchised that they cannot vote.
As an aside, a quietly liberal tradition of having female imams and mosques for
women is flourishing among China’s ten million Hui Muslims, which is a globally
unique phenomenon. The Chinese example ultimately empowers women to work within
their own space and lead prayer and manage that space on their own. This is a
significant form of women asserting themselves in the Islamic tradition. Some
Islamic scholars say that female imams and women’s mosques are important
because their endurance in China offers a vision of an older form of Islam that
has inclusiveness and tolerance, not marginalisation and extremism at its core.
This is in contrast to many Islamic countries like Pakistan where contemporary
fundamentalist movements use the space provided by the mosque to affirm all
types of patriarchy and male power over women. In these countries, gender-based
violence and fear, segregated public spaces and social coercion are also used
to keep women subjugated.
The problem of women in Pakistan is symbolic of the problem of inequalities and
injustices in society in general. While women’s movement in Pakistan is gaining
momentum and gathering pace and reaching one milestone after another, the ill
treatment and atrocities on women are recurring in regular and brutal manner.
Many gender disparities remain even as the country develops politically, which
calls for sustained and focused public action. To be effective, these measures
must target the root causes of inequality without ignoring the domestic
political economy. Political parties should promote and ensure greater
inclusion of women in decision-making and leadership positions. Corrective
policies will yield substantial development payoffs if they focus on persistent
gender inequalities that matter most for welfare. Pakistan can benefit from
emulating China’s success in increasing female economic, social and political
participation to enhance economic growth and social harmony.
The writer can be reached at [email protected]
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