Gender issues

The norms of equality The GMSL as an organization that tries to works within universally accepted norms of gender equality. However, these are not the only norms that it factors in to its treatment of gender. The GMSL also bases its gender decisions on equity and takes cognizance of the social and cultural realities of the country in its treatment of gender related issues as well. What we have in Sri Lanka, from a gender perspective, is a matriarchy upon which patriarchy was imposed by the outside agency during colonization. This (especially in urban settings from which academics, career social workers and others of that ilk spring) did not lead to a primarily patriarchal society but rather to a pea soup of half-understood values and questionable and weakly established norms that are confusing and used by both men and women to optimize advantage for themselves. Against this background, it is not possible to reduce the matter of gender equality and gender equity to statistics. Implicitly therefore, the words equality and equity are not interchangeable in our societies. Take the matter of pregnancy. As I mentioned earlier, the law states that we give expectant mothers three months paid leave. However, our norms based on equity and natural justice states that a woman requires a complete year off to exclusively nurse her baby. In the eyes of the law and those of the world, it is acceptable to make a pregnant mother work until her water bag bursts at her office table. Subsequently she is expected to return in three months after the purchase of breast pumps and nannies to look after the needs of her child. We reject this mechanism as being neither just nor fair. Therefore we give our ladies up to two years paid leave either side of her confinement and feeding hours for as long as she wishes and this is not governed by generalized dictates of medical science or law. We further encourage our women to make use of traditional social systems with extended families helping in the rearing of very young children in familiar environments. While we recognize that for single mothers, mothers broken away from their relatives etc, systems of day care or the establishment of such centers in work environments is valid. However, in Sri Lanka, this is the exception not the norm and thus we encourage mothers to use their existing social networks since these are far stronger and far more positive in nurturing infants. For us, all these processes takes precedence over any others including the fact that if a managerial female staffer was in such a situation, our work, driven by a small and dedicated group, will become difficult. With our emphasis on youth empowerment, our female staffers are mostly of child bearing age and many are in new marriages or new partnerships/relationships. If

more than one female staffer gets pregnant then our work gets seriously compromised. In our society, such things as a group of female staff discussing their futures and planning their pregnancies in series are unheard of. Such clinical mechanisms would be socially, culturally and traditionally rejected. In this matter, the male dominates the female and we recognize that in this case there is little that a) we will do and b) we will want to do. The matter of childbirth is not, for us, a matter of serial process or planning within frameworks of work life where work life takes precedence over private lives. This is consistent with our ideology in empowering women where we insist that family unity and strength are key factors in ensuring resilience to outside threats. While we do our best under such circumstances, there are recurring instances where we have used male managerial staff to tide us over in order to ensure that we do not lose the wood for the trees or, the program because of process. Take the case of hired/ young/ urban/ graduate female staff for field work. These staffers work out of our head office and are generally at higher decision making levels. While we offer flexible working hours to our women, encourage completion of work before 6 p.m. and provide escorted transport home in the event of late work hours, in field situations any or all of these can, and usually do, get compromised. Again, we feel it is just to accede to requests by female staff to have at least one other female with them on field trips. However, we doubt that donors will see the validity of a budget line that reads travel cost for escort personnel or cost for accommodation for additional escort personnel. Additionally, pressure from the partners and spouses of young female staff is very high and overrides all organizational policy and decisions. This is a reality in Sri Lanka and the GMSL cannot and will not intervene in this intensely personal matter. All in all, while we tried experiments over the last 7 years with this particular demographic, it has not really worked. Our efforts towards reaching a culturally sensitized, equitable policy framework that cuts-across and addresses all sub-stratums of society are ongoing. In the interim, we take cognizance of the fact that hiring women purely for gender equality may achieve statistical goals for organizational management but not always achieve the goals of programs and projects. Processes of engagement: Does this mean that the GMSL rejects due recognition of women as persons able to play crucial roles in social exercises? Not at all. We understand that we exist in order to ensure that our poor, our marginalized and our disenfranchised are empowered and mainstreamed into the overall socio-economic framework of the country through dignified, equitable, fair, high quality and recognized work. In this respect, our ideological stance is that these groups are the primary stakeholders in our exercises. We recognize that in a world of democratic ownership of development, these groups own everything we do. We recognize that we are merely facilitators for ensuring their re-empowerment and their stability within sound familial and communal system. As such, the true decision makes for the work of the movement are these people and amongst these, a full 70% of our engagement is with women. With such programs as the FFSAP and the CBM initiative, 98% of those engaging in this work are women. 100% of those in

decision making positions at the higher (senior most management level) level that of the community where decisions really count are women. This was not out of a desire on our part to adhere to statistics but rather, due to the fact that matriarchy in rural communities is far stronger and far more relevant to the stability of the community than imported patriarchy and thus, women (rather than men) naturally gravitated towards what they perceived as wholesome, highly empowering and supportive engagements with our movement and our initiatives. In all our other activities to re-establish the validity of matriarchy as the basis for social empowerment and solidarity for effectiveness of development of poor, marginalized and disenfranchised groups we, organically, engage with women more than men with the balance being 7:3. Thus, the true decision makers of our movement (not forgetting the fact that this movement comprises of 153 rural CBOs and only 16 staffers at the formal offices of the organization) are overwhelmingly women not out of choice, not out of chance, but, rather, because in Sri Lanka, the traditionally high seat given to our women and respect for their ability to make sound decisions is in our blood.