Bearing the Burden of Culture
Speech delivered by Pru Goward, Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner at the Unifem Australia Reception, Brisbane City Hall, Brisbane, 24 October 2002
Lord Mayor Jim Soorley, City Councillors present, May Lamont, UNIFEM Chairperson, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Thank you for inviting me here this evening. It is a great honour to have been asked to address this year's UNIFEM Australia reception.
Standing in this room with all of you here tonight, it's great pleasure to see that in Australia we have so many women committed to furthering the rights of women not only in our country, but also globally.
Thanks to your commitment, women in Australia remain a vital part of today's global women's movement.
We so often hear that feminism is dead - that young women today aren't interested in it; that it is no longer relevant to their lives.
We hear that older women have 'done their time'; that the 'battles' they fought have now been won.
Yet despite its professed death, today no movement in the world today is comparable to the women's movement - it is alive, powerful and tenacious.
Year after year it is a tide that keeps on turning.
Sometimes it's a Tsunami - an event will occur which captures global attention and sees advocates of women's rights all around the world unite, in force, to respond to an injustice.
Take the world wide outrage expressed at the sentencing to death by stoning of Amina Lawal in Nigeria.
Most of the time however it operates as waves do - pounding, continual and unrelenting.
There are rarely still waters.
And it is growing.
Look at UNIFEM for example.
Since its creation in 1976, it has grown into a network that spans over 100 countries.
It has 14 Regional Programme Directors and a growing network of affiliated gender advisors and specialists in Africa, the Arab States, Asia and the Pacific, Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States, Latin America and the Caribbean.
While in a perfect world there would be no need for such a strong women's movement, in our world - a world where women continue to be stoned to death; subject to dowry burnings; forced into arranged marriages; and exist as women in patriarchal structures - there is.
That the movement still thrives globally is a reason for delight for women, like yourselves, who have dedicated time to fostering and nurturing the movement.
As Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner, it gives me great pleasure to know I stand united with women around the world in the work that I do.
This is not to suggest that around the world there is a homogenous group of women advocating their rights, and the rights of their sisters.
Nor is it to suggest that advocating women's rights means the same thing around the world.
What it does suggest is that globally women's rights are still vulnerable.
Everywhere we feel a need to protect them.
In most countries, women's rights remain an intangible concept - the challenge remains making them something concrete.
In Australia we are lucky in this respect.
We have strong Federal and State anti-discrimination legislation making gender based discrimination unlawful. This legislation often goes further than just prohibiting certain behaviour.
One of the objects of the Sex Discrimination Act for example is to promote the recognition and acceptance within the community of the principle of equality of men and women.
This means that in my role as Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner, I have the legislative backing to move beyond dealing with more limited anti-discrimination issues into broader equality agenda.
This provides a platform for action. My contribution, as Sex Discrimination Commissioner, to the national debate we are currently having on paid maternity leave arises because a national scheme of paid maternity, in addressing issues of workplace disadvantage, will promote the equality of women in Australia today.
Having in place this national legislative framework that enshrines women's rights at a domestic level often lets us think we are off the hook.
But we are not.
The rights of women in Australia remain vulnerable, as we are faced with the same fundamental challenge as women around the world - we bear the burden of culture.
In theory, culture incorporates men and women.
In practice however, it is women who have their behaviour regulated by culture in a way that often puts at risk their physical well being, health and security.
This is a universal experience, even though for women, bearing the burden of culture means very different things in different countries.
It is the cultural, religious, social, political and economic realities of a country that will determine how this burden manifests.
However, as the world becomes a 'smaller place'; as access to information means that we are more aware of what is happening to women not only in our neighbouring countries, but in countries around the world, we cannot ignore how this burden manifests itself here and in other different countries - especially when it sits uncomfortably with our universal system of women's rights and human rights.
The recent sentencing of Amina Lawal to death by stoning, a suitable punishment under traditional Shari'ah law, for becoming pregnant out of wedlock is an example of this. It is a horrific case, and one that has captured international media attention, however let's not forget that it is only one such example of the vulnerable position women around the world find themselves in everyday.
In Africa for example, bearing the burden of culture may mean undergoing female genital mutilation. This seriously jeopardises the health of a woman, and may result in her death, yet these concerns come second when weighed up against the cultural need to ensure her marriageability.
Arranged marriages for young girls, are a cultural norm in countries such as India. While tradition, family and communal existence and cultural practice dictate that this happen, it reinforces that a women's life is a mere commodity to be traded with and bargained for.
That dowry burnings remain a common occurrence highlights the vulnerable position of women in marriage in India.
In Australia we see Aboriginal women bearing the burden of culture as the arranged marriage of a 15 year old girl to a 50 year old man in the Northern Territory comes under public scrutiny.
The challenge in this situation, as in many of these situations, lies in finding where women and girls sits amidst often conflicting systems of law. In this case, customary, national and international human rights law - each which has something to say about her body and her rights.
Each purports to protect some part of her identity.
Universal trends also clash with culture. A clash from which women in Australia are not exempt.
For example, we live in a world which makes money a necessity for survival.
Access to money is usually equated with access to paid work and bearing the burden of culture often limits women's access to paid work.
It is not surprising then that women account for as much as 70 per cent of the world's poor, that globally, the face of poverty is a feminine one. [1]
In Australia for example, women earn 66 cents in the male dollar from the day they enter motherhood.
Men and women in their 20s earn, by contrast, about the same.
Women are more likely to be dependant on welfare payments, and are more likely to end up poor in old age.
This is partially explained by the fact that traditional women's work in whatever form it takes, be it caring for children, cooking, household chores, tending to livestock and subsistence crops, goes unpaid.
However, we cannot ignore that women no longer only perform unpaid work.
Today, women comprise an increasing share of the world's labour force - at least one third in all regions except northern Africa and western Asia.
In Australia, women make up close to 50 per cent of the labour force. [2]
That despite these high paid workforce participation rates women remain the world's poorest means that something else is happening.
We need look no further than within the workforce to see what it is - globally, women remain at the lower end of segregated labour markets and continue to be concentrated in a few occupations, to hold positions of little or no authority and to receive less pay than men.
While, better access to education, self-employment and part-time and home-based work have expanded opportunities for women's participation in the labour force, these areas of employment are characterised by lack of security, lack of benefits, and low income.
So even those women who work, still have a greater chance of being poor than men who work.
It is also not surprising then that globally, prostitution and the trafficking of women is rife as poverty often drives women into the only form of paid work they can legitimately access.
Trafficking, as the concept suggests, is a problem that knows no boundaries. It takes the poorest and most vulnerable from source countries and delivers them into the waiting hands of destination countries - be it across the globe, or in a neighbouring State. They are to be found in brothels from Melbourne to Marseilles.
Even if we addressed the worst of these economic inequalities - if women no longer made up the majority of the world's poor, while we might see the problem of trafficking recede, we would still see sexual slavery, servitude and trafficking in women.
Why? Because we live in a world of power imbalances and dominance relationships which are not in favour of women.
And these dominance relationships do not only manifest in acts as sinister as the trafficking of women. We need look no further than traditional family arrangements to see how these power imbalances are a cultural burden that women must bear.
Much of the workplace disadvantage that women in Australia experience today results from the fact that women bear children and as such, there is a belief that their role is in the home, looking after the child while a man's place is in the workforce. He is the family breadwinner.
When the world operates in accordance with this norm, this power imbalance may go undetected, but as soon as there is an attempt to redress this patriarchal structure, problems arise - women who enter the workforce earn less, find it more difficult to advance their careers and have to cope with the double burden of juggling work and mothering.
This highlights the common failing of dominant culture - the ability to change.
Women everywhere also bear the burden of what has often been described as a 'culture of eroticism.' A culture that breeds sexual violence against women, be it in the form of domestic violence, rape or sexual harassment. This universal culture permeates and defines the lives of many women around the world. It forms a part of their everyday experience.
In many ways, women today continue to be the "packhorses of culture."
Too often boys and men are allowed and encouraged to embrace the new, modern, Western world, while the girls and women are seen as the vehicles for and bearers of cultural continuation.
Lumped with the task of carrying on often age old traditions, they jeopardise their freedom, their health, and their security.
Their culture, which is important to them, often comes into direct conflict with systems of universal rights and women's rights.
Women and young girls should not be forced to choose.
The challenge therefore is finding a place for tradition, culture and women rights in a modern world, and more specifically in the lives of women - for whom both are important.
1.
United Nations Population Fund, The State of World Population 2001-
Footprints and Milestones: Population and Environmental Change, UNFPA,
New York, 2001, as cited in the Commission on Population and Development,
Report of the Secretary-General: The flow of financial resources for
assisting in the implementation of the Programme of Action of the International
Conference on Population and Development, New York, February 11, 2002,
pages 1-2.
2. ABS 6203.0 Labour Force Australia, August 2001, 26.
