Providing perspectives on women’s rights
The ongoing challenges to achieve gender equality were highlighted during an event in Swift Current to celebrate International Women’s Day.
The Southwest Newcomer Welcome Centre in partnership with Southwest Crisis Services and Southwest Multicultural Association hosted the celebration at St. Stephen’s Anglican Church, March 6.
Volunteer cooks prepared a meal with dishes from different parts of Africa and afterwards a panel of four speakers reflected in this year’s International Women’s Day theme, “I am Generation Equality: Realizing Women’s Rights.”
The guest speakers were local residents Keleah Ostrander, Bula Ghosh, Scott Matthies and Lindsay Gates. Each speaker provided a different perspective on the issue of gender equality.
International Women’s Day is marked every year on March 8 and events take place in countries around the world to reflect on issues of gender equality. A new United Nations report, which was released a few days before this date, found that progress towards gender equality is faltering and hard-won advances are being reversed. The sentiment of this report was echoed by Bula Ghosh, who spoke about the ongoing challenges to achieve gender equality.
“There is no country in the world that truly has gender equality,” she emphasized. “Women remain still very undervalued and they work more, but they earn less, they have fewer choices, and they are the victims of multiple cases of violence.”
She referred to the history of women’s rights in Canada and noted that there has been a lot of progress, but there is still a long way to go. Saskatchewan still has one of the highest rates of domestic violence among all the provinces. She mentioned other data to indicate the challenges still ahead, for example pay inequity between men and women. At the current rate of change in the world, women will only achieve wage equality by the year 2133.
“We cannot rest until the most visionary agenda for women’s rights and true empowerment in all areas of life for now and generations to come become a reality,” she said. “We cannot rest until the work is done.”
Keleah Ostrander shared her experience as a woman involved in community development and program delivery. She grew up in a small rural town in eastern Saskatchewan, where she experienced a sense of inclusion.
“I truly grew up believing that any of us girls could be anything we wanted to be through hard work and dedication,” she said. “What I didn’t realize until many years later was that this wasn’t the case for every girl in Saskatchewan or Canada, let alone around the world.”
She has come to the conclusion that significant progress has been achieved locally and elsewhere, but ongoing work is still required to achieve gender equality.
She added there is at the same time a need to reconsider the definition of female equality. Women are encouraged to be whatever they want to be and to pursue careers, but at the same time there are expectations about their roles and responsibilities at home and in the community.
“In the midst of this, our children are increasingly spending more time alone or online with little time or connection with their mothers,” she said. “Partners whose paths simply cross as one comes home as the other heads to work, and women who feel they aren’t doing well at anything, because they’re simply doing too many things, and women whose self image is affected by all of this, are leading to exponentially increased levels of mental health struggles and anxiety.”
She felt society will suffer if the current concept of gender equality is not changed to accommodate the realities of women’s roles and contributions to society.
“I think we forgot that perhaps equality for women needs to be looked at through a lens of balance,” she said. “We tend to get stuck on ensuring things are equal when for women perhaps we need to acknowledge that we as women are all unique people with their own unique habits and desires. Balance is what is needed and to approach all facets of society, which will allow women and society to be healthy, engaged and truly lead generation equality.”
Scott Matthies provided a male perspective about the role of men to promote gender equality. His Christian faith serves as a guiding principle for his views about gender equality, and it starts with the biblical references to the creation of men and women in the image of God.
“If both men and women are created in the image of God, they both have equal value and that’s a starting place,” he said.
He referred to the descriptions in the Bible of the ways that Jesus interacted with women, which was contrary to the accepted cultural norms of the time. Jesus addressed women in public and revealed his divinity to women, he showed women respect and compassion, he taught women alongside men, and he called out injustice towards women.
“So the way Jesus walked in the world and treated the girls and women in his life stands as a significant marker for how I should walk,” he said.
Matthies expressed concern about the issue of othering and its impact on efforts to achieve gender equality. Girls and women have been subjected to othering, which means that an entire group is seen as less valuable and different to one’s own self or collective identity.
He felt a certain feminist perspective has started to refer to men as the other, and this view is pitting women against men in a moral struggle. He said it is important to involve boys and men in the process to achieve gender equality, but now they are being told to shut up and to get out of the way.
“There is a logical fallacy at play with this perspective and it’s not intellectually consistent that the othering of girls and women as a group was and is wrong, but othering of men as a group is acceptable,” he mentioned.
He believes men can play an important role to promote gender equality through their active roles to mentor boys in a positive way.
“A young boy who grows into a man that does not objectify girls and women, that sees them as real people with equal value to himself, will be a man who treats women with respect and dignity,” he said.
Lawyer Lindsay Gates provided a legal perspective about the barriers to gender equality. There are laws in Canada and Saskatchewan to reduce and eliminate gender inequality, but these barriers still exist in society. She suggested these barriers are related to certain societal expectations about gender roles.
“The reality is women are often disadvantaged in the workforce because of our child rearing capabilities,” she said. “In my view, it is because of the gender role expectations in our society. It’s not a legal barrier causing these issues.”
Women are faced with unrealistic expectations, because they are supposed to work as if they do not have a family and to do parenting as if they do not have a job.
She spoke about various pieces of legislation that promote gender equality, but she felt more needs to be done to improve women’s ability to access legal services. This is often an issue within the context of family law.
“I see women who have stayed in unhealthy relationships because they don’t feel they have any other options financially,” she said. “I see women settle for less than what they are legally entitled to, whether that’s on a property division or on the support side, because they don’t have the financial means to pursue those rights. … So we need more resources to close this gap and make legal solutions and make justice accessible for everybody, including women. We have a lot of legislation that’s friendly from an equity perspective. In my experience, though, this access to justice can be a huge barrier.”