No matter who we are, or what our gender, we all just want to know we will get the same opportunities in our work, our health, our education, and our society more widely. It’s a reasonable thing to expect in 2020 that our gender will play no role in our, or our children’s, opportunity to thrive.
Yet we do experience different opportunities based on our gender in ways that lead to both individual and collective harms. From the way we teach boys to ignore emotions and feelings and their health and mental wellbeing, through to how we treat the work that women do as less important in our economy.
Why is this still happening? Partly it is because outdated gender stereotypes about what we can and cannot do, how we should and should not act, and even what and who matters most, implicitly informs what we pay attention to. These stereotypes affect our decisions and the systems we build to help run society. This includes our policy making systems.
Policymakers have an important role to play. People in government make decisions about whose needs are greatest, what harms matter most, where resources and interventions and supports are best focused. Gender is an important factor in these decisions.
Political parties barely mention gender
The results of the Gender Justice Collective scorecard of political parties policies this election reflect the reality that, while gender is a critical aspect to our experience of the world, too many policymakers in New Zealand ignore it. Only one party (The Greens) even specifically articulated gender as an issue. I don’t think I have heard Jacinda Adrern mention poverty as a gendered issue once this term (*disclaimer: I have not listened to all her child poverty speeches). A failure to factor gender in as an explicit part of policy making has very real effects, as Covid-19 has shown us.
Not only has there been more job losses in the areas more women work in (including in part-time roles) as a result of Covid-19, but women have also had to do more caring work as a result of schools closing and other care services being limited. Child poverty is also expected to increase. With sole parents and caregivers being overrepresented in child poverty statistics, and most sole parents being women, there is a significant gender impact of Covid-19 on poverty.
However, policymakers have not especially considered how Covid-19 is affecting women and men differently in their work, caring responsibilities, or economic independence. The policy responses are not as effective as they should be to help us get through the pandemic. Leaving women more exposed to the ongoing impacts of Covid-19 ultimately means all of us are more deeply impacted by Covid-19. We are interdependent so when one group doesn’t do well, none of us do well.
How can we support policy makers to pay more attention to gender?
The question I ask myself as a woman who wants more opportunities for women – especially for Māori and Pacific women, disabled women, poorly resourced women, those whose needs are most ignored – is what would it take to get gender on the agenda for policymakers?
One thing I keep coming back to is that perhaps we need to talk more about men. This may seem counterintuitive. The inequality and harm women and non-binary folk experience occurs in part because men’s lives, needs and thoughts are the default in many societies’ systems – men’s stories are centred.
For example, our transport systems and roads are designed primarily for the convenience of people who work nine to five in a city centre and drive a car to get there with no other responsibilities to manage (that is, primarily men). Work itself is designed so the best pay and conditions, and greatest advancements are given to those who work fulltime and stay in the workforce without a break (also men). Car safety is tested using an average-sized man, and much health research does the same. Child poverty interventions virtually never account for the gender pay gap. Given this, how would a greater focus on men’s lives help?
We talk about the problem of male suicide, but hardly ever talk about why men are lonely, experience isolation from each other, their partners, their children, or others in their lives.
It’s how we talk about men that matters. Rather than centring men’s current way of life and upholding that, we need to talk more about how the issues and problems men experience intersect and interconnect with gender inequality more widely. Less of the ‘Man Alone’ approach.
We talk about how to protect women from “violence” or family violence. We hardly ever use language in which we talk about how to prevent men using violence against women, children, or each other and even less about why these men believe they need to try to control women, children and each other.
We talk about the problem of male suicide, but hardly ever talk about why men are lonely, experience isolation from each other, their partners, their children, or others in their lives.
When we talk about maternal mental health we often talk about women’s need to be well supported, how lonely it can be parenting, and sometimes we talk about men not taking on caring responsibilities. We rarely talk about men’s need to spend time together with their children and partners in the first months, taking on caring, and how to make it happen.
We talk about sexual violence and rape, how to keep women and children safe, how to create more just rape trials. We rarely talk about the conditions in society that lead to boys and young men disrespecting another human being, and themselves, to such a degree.
We live in a society in which beliefs about masculinity, the treatment of men, and their lives, have a direct impact on women’s opportunities and wellbeing.
We talk about stopping bullying and harassment and violence towards young people who are queer, non-binary, trans. Do we talk enough about why the people who enact this violence believe that there are “rules” about gender that people must adhere to and where those beliefs start?
We talk about the gender pay gap, how women need to “lean in” or take up more opportunities, go into male-dominated industries, or behave more like men in the workplace. We hardly ever talk about how to support more men to be able to choose part-time work, to become professional carers, or nurses, or teachers.
We live in a society in which beliefs about masculinity, the treatment of men, and their lives, have a direct impact on women’s opportunities and wellbeing. Perhaps gender will make it onto the policy making agenda when gender equality is linked more clearly to and involves the lives of men.
