British politics lags behind Rwanda in sex equality

By Veronica Oakeshott
ePolitiX.com
September 24, 2009

Photo:
Veronica Oakeshott ponders the role of gender in politics.

How does being a girl or a boy affect your life? Would you swap?

That was the question put to guests this week when Harriet Harmen launched Plan International's report on girls' opportunities worldwide.

We never heard her answer, but the event left us in no doubt at all as to what it would be if she were one of the 45 million school-aged girls kept away from school to cook, clean, care for their siblings or earn a living.

Globally, the sexual divide can mean life or death.

Girls in the developing world are three times as likely to be malnourished and women and girls bear 60 per cent of the burden of HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Girls get less food because boys are seen as an economic investment and girls are not.

They get more HIV because many girls and women lack the negotiating power to get their partners to wear condoms; or to choose when or with whom they have sex.

And because sometimes their sex is the only bargaining chip they have, and if they've been denied an education they are not aware of the fatally high stakes involved.

Harriet Harman's participation in the event was a reminder that this is one area of development where we can't peer down pitifully to Africa from the heights of success.

In political terms, when it comes to gender equality we are the developing nation.

Rwanda has more female MPs than male ones; Liberia has a female president.

All the while in Westminster we're running a 'modernised' parliamentary timetable where votes run past 10pm, there are no childcare facilities and female MPs with families constantly face thinly veiled suggestions they are neglecting their children.

So how would Harriet answer the 'would I swap' question?

She's been derided for wanting to institutionalise a gender balance in British politics and nicknamed Harriet Harperson by The Sun (you know, the one that still publishes pictures of topless teenage girls on Page 3) for a supposed obsession with political correctness.

Yet, despite it all, I bet the answer would be 'no'. It may be the very challenge that drives her.

As one speaker at the launch put it, anyone who calls themselves a post-feminist has kept her Wonderbra and burnt her brains.

And, I would add, has certainly not read 'Because I’m a Girl' by Plan International.

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