A Woman's Lot

The role of girls and boys, men and women, and mothers and fathers, has been the subject of much debate in the last four decades.

Religion and laws have segregated the male and female roles for centuries. The segregation has moved away from the basis of obvious biological differences to cultural and social constructs that have deliberately favoured one gender over the other depending on the issue or circumstances.

The gender debate is far from concluded, and is just as far from arriving at a consensus across the world. The discussion and dialogue continues to evolve with time.

On the ground however, evidence shows that in Zambia just as many girls are enrolled in primary school as boys. This equity stops there as statistics begin to reveal that more boys end up in secondary school than girls. The trend continues at tertiary education where the numbers start to dramatically change in favour of males.

Some explanations include the fact that girls are socialized at an early age to take up domestic work in the home and soon become child minders and home builders even while there are in primary school. This situation then makes it cost saving to withdraw the girl child from school to replace domestic workers and yet compel the boy child to go to school as a means to keep him occupied and out of mischief.

Many secondary school girls tend to fall prey to pregnancy and have to leave school to tend to their new born child while the father of the child gets away with paying a ‘charge for damages’ and continues in school without any further responsibilities towards the child. The Zambian law theoretically protects pregnant girls from being expelled for becoming pregnant (the correct term is actually falling pregnant which graphically illustrates how pregnancy makes a girl fall from favour, society, school, and freedom), but the reality is that pregnancy physically knocks a girl out of school because of the logistics and costs of having a baby and looking after a baby.

The girl child who develops into a young woman soon becomes mentally and physically more mature than her male counterpart. The combination of childhood experiences, exposure, and maturity generally makes the young woman more aware, awake, sensitive, and deductive in such a way as to exhibit good business sense and a much talked about attribute commonly known as ‘woman’s intuition’. In short, young women are far sharper, and are better judges of character, than their men folk.

Alas, the lot for a woman is not as hopeful as that of a man. Many women will find themselves with not much more than basic education as they enter adulthood. Many women negotiate life with the domestic skills that they have developed in their homes, and tend to emphasize on their looks rather than their brains in an effort to secure a good life.

Those women that have managed to make it to the top with low education and good domestic and family building skills, have had to settle for miserable relationships and constant verbal and physical abuse from their spouses, because they have no place else to go.

It is said that access to money is access to power. For many women the power is in the pockets of their spouses and this power develops an imbalance in the relationship to the extent that the man often reminds his woman partner that she can either take life his way or go away and fend for herself. Most women do not want to be put in a position to have to make the choice because going away from comfort and security is not easy.

Laws have had to be made to protect women in the work place from harassment and abuse from their male co-workers. The fact that these laws are now in place I many countries across the world is testimony of the prolific existence of harassment of the woman worker.

The modern woman is faced with experiences of covert harassment in the work place, the prospect of being dumped with young children when her spouse decides to up and leave for better prospects, disrespect from family and society for not having a good education, insufficient earnings due to poor work skills and training (outside the hospitality industry), oppression and ridicule from a better educated and higher earning spouse.

This is a woman’s lot today if she has a humble education and set of skills that relegate her to the role of domestic worker for the family and low income earner.

This lot should not be the case if the girl child can be kept in school, attain a university education, and use all the life skills that she has developed, and all the experiences that she has been exposed to in her youth, to become a top earner and performer in her chosen career. The rise of women in Zambia to top positions in government and industry is proof that a women’s lot is largely determined by the focus on education in youth and in early adulthood.

Women can avoid needing a sugar daddy to pay the bills. Women can stop being marketed as prize possessions. Women can prevent the situation of being viewed as family assets much like livestock and property. Women can change the notion of being described as the weaker sex.

Empowered women are the ones that take their lives into their own hands by jumping into the driver seat and steering the course of life either on their own, or with their spouses, as contributing, confident, and respectable partners in building a home and a future.

A woman’s lot can be by design and not by default as has been the case in the past. The woman of today has some influence on her present life and the future, but with the assistance of her family, she can chart a path to happiness and success with a good and relevant education as the driving mechanism.

Published 6 June 2010