RIGHTS-ASIA: A Role for Men in Gender Equality Fight

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Sep 9 2004 (IPS) - When the international community meets next year to review the status of women 10 years after a ground-breaking conference on gender, the role of men in the quest for the equality of sexes will be high on the agenda.

It stems from the increasing awareness that men have to be roped into the battle for gender equality, say experts participating in a week-long conference here to review the status of women in the Asia-Pacific region.

”Men’s role in the achievement of gender equality is now on the international agenda,” Michael Flood, a researcher at the Australia Institute, a Canberra-based think tank, declared in a paper he wrote for the regional meeting.

”The question of male involvement is now being explored in relation to such diverse fields as interpersonal violence, development, sexual and reproductive health, parenting and families, and work and the economy,” the paper added.

This marks a further shift from the old logic that gender issues had to be fought by women with the exclusion of men. ”This logic can no longer be sustained,” Flood told participants during a panel discussion on Thursday. ”Men and boys are unavoidably involved in gender issues.”

The Asia-Pacific region, in fact, has displayed its willingness to embrace this idea with a range of initiatives from countries in South-east Asia, South Asia and the Pacific.

In Malaysia, says Flood, men are taking on a greater share of domestic work and ”male-only ‘men’ clubs’ have been adopted as tools for developing men’s self-awareness and gender sensitivity.”

While in Cambodia and the Philippines, men are taking on an active role to combat violence against women in local communities.

The Cambodia Men’s Network, for instance, calls on men to serve as role models for youth by expressing their opposition to trends that condone violence against women.

”Some projects working with men in the Asia-Pacific region aim both to lessen gender inequalities and to address men’s health,” says Flood. ”Some men are living already in gender-just ways. They respect and care for women and girls in their lives, and they reject traditional, sexist norms of manhood.”

Such discussions about men were very much on the margins, if they were had at all, when leaders from 189 countries joined women’s rights activists in Beijing in 1995 to shape a global plan of action to secure gender equality.

”There were hardly any discussions in Beijing about the role men had (to play) to achieve women’s rights,” Radhika Coomaraswamy, former U.N. Special Representative on Violence Against Women, said in an interview.

But five years later, discussions on securing gender equality had opened up to include more views on the reponsibility men had as agents of change, she added. ”Women felt that unless men were involved there will not be real progress.”

The meeting next year to review the Beijing Platform for Action (BPFA) will address the role of men as vital partners for gender equality, Carolyn Hannan, director at the division for the advancement of women at the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, told IPS.

”Quite a lot of attention will be paid to this issue,” she said. ”The pace at which it is being accepted in this region reflects the shift since the 1995 conference.”

In addition, the meeting next year will also scrutinise the region’s performance on a range of indicators to gauge the status of girls and women a decade after the BPFA was endorsed.

According to a background paper produced by the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), a Bangkok-based U.N. agency, seven of the 53 countries who belong to the regional body are still lagging in gender equality in a key area – primary schooling for all children.

They include Afghanistan, Cambodia, India, Laos, Nepal, Pakistan and Solomon Islands.

That number increases to 16 countries with gender disparities at the secondary schooling level and to over 20 at the tertiary level of education, the ESCAP paper notes. ”Of the 42 countries in the region for which data were available, half had significantly less girls enrolled than boys (at the tertiary level),” the report states.

In relation to access to health services, select countries in the region – such as Iran, Papua New Guinea, Cambodia, Laos, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal – have failed to meet all the needs of women.

And while women in the work force appear to have made headway since the Beijing conference, the quality of jobs women are in reflect their vulnerable status. ”In Asia, a high proportion of jobs (for women) is in the informal sector and characterised by irregularity, low pay and a lack of security,” states the report.

In governance, too, women are still lagging behind men in the region, with women accounting for 12 percent among the heads of state in Asia-Pacific, 15 percent of seats in national legislatures, 17 percent among local governments and five percent as local mayors.

”Regional and international organisations, including the United Nations system have similarly failed to achieve gender balance,” Socorro Reyes, founder of the Centre for Legislative Development, a Manila-based think tank, stated in a paper for this week’s conference.

Five years after Beijing, ”it was found out that women continue to be grossly underrepresented in the higher echelons of decision-making in government, the private sector, the judiciary, the media and in academic institutions,” she said.

”Nothing has changed since then – specifically, in the Asia- Pacific region,” she added.