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by Lionel Wijesiri

AAny definition of economic development is incomplete if it fails to comprehend the contribution of women towards development and the consequence of development towards the lives of women. Every development policy, plan or project has an impact on women and cannot succeed without the work of women. And, development with justice calls for measures that will give women access to better jobs: that will diminish the arduous tasks that women face in their domestic and occupations: and that will distribute more fairly between the sexes opportunities for creative work and economic advancement.

Yet economic development in Sri Lanka is often still talked about as if it is mainly a subject for men. There are strong reasons to address women's needs in policies of the Government. Women contribute to economic development through their labour and their consumption. Studies have determined that when women have extra income they channel these earnings into meeting their children's needs which means better food, better health care, and more schooling. In a traditional society like ours, women are the primary caregivers for their families. The unpaid work of rearing children, preparing food, maintaining a household, and tending the ill, although invaluable, are invisible.

The economic models used by international financial institutions fail to take into account this unpaid work which leads to an over-use of women's labour. For example, World Bank and International Monetary Fund prescribe structural adjustment policies which often involve cutbacks in government-provided social services and higher prices for basic necessities. Consequently, women often must work harder to stretch their limited funds. Many have to spend more time shopping for cheaper items, cultivating home gardens to supplement store-bought food, caring for sick family members at home longer before taking them to the doctor, and walking rather than taking public transport. In our country, no one has studied in depth the potential effects of economic policies on women's status or on sustainable development.

Doing so would enable planners to ascertain which groups may benefit from them and which may lose out, and to modify policies to assist groups of women and their communities who would be negatively affected.

Barriers

The UN conferences and summits, particularly the World Conference on Women and the UN Conference on Environment and Development, have underlined that the contribution of women to economic development, social development and environmental protection, which are mutually reinforcing components of sustainable development, should be recognized and supported, and that there is a need for a clear gender perspective in environmental management. Moreover, unless the wisdom and contribution of women is recognized and supported, sustainable development will be an elusive goal.

If we are to grapple successfully with the problem of women and economic development, of preparing them to take their due place in the social structure, there are a number of problems to which we must attend. Of those, I believe, the "invisible barrier" and "the work and family balance" are very important.

The Invisible barrier

What is a "invisible barrier"? A barrier that keeps people from going past a certain point but transparent and therefore virtually invisible until the person crashes into it. Invisible barrier is an apt label for the phenomenon faced by our women who aspire to positions of leadership. Because increasing numbers of women are entering fields that often lead to leadership positions: law, business, politics, education, science, many assume that getting to top positions is a matter of time and energy. Yet the proportion of women who have made it into high leadership positions remains stunningly small. We do not have official statistics but sample surveys done indicate that the nation's boardrooms remain overwhelmingly male: a simple survey within 50 industries revealed that 85 percent of the senior-level managers were men.

Even women who do make it past the invisible barrier into top executive positions apparently do not reach a place where gender equity is the norm. A recent study of executives in a number of asset-rich companies showed that the women who had reached this level faced a second invisible barrier. These women made the same pay and received the same bonuses as their male counterparts. However, they managed fewer people, were given fewer options, and obtained fewer overseas assignments than the men did.

They had reached the same level as the men; however, being in the same position does not necessarily imply having the same level of status and clout in the organization. When surveyed, the women reported more obstacles and less satisfaction than the men did with their future career opportunities. Clearly, they had received the message that they had moved up as far as they could in their company whereas the men were more likely to see new opportunities ahead.

Work and Family Balance

Studies of the way that women and men use their time show that, our women spend more hours per week working than men do. However, for women, a larger proportion of time-spent working is devoted to unpaid work: housework and other domestic activities that are not counted when economists try to quantify work. In our country, two-thirds to three-quarters of the domestic work is performed by women. Women tend to do the cooking, laundry, housecleaning, and ironing; men tend to do household repair and maintenance. Our women do 95 percent of meal preparation and clean up.

They also do most of the childcare, especially when children are young. Even women who are employed full time do most of the domestic work in their households. So, our women in general face a invisible barrier that impedes their career advancement, and the necessity to balance home and childcare responsibilities with employment and a significant number of women head households in which there is no other adult earner. It is little wonder that Sri Lankan women as a group hold fewer economic resources than men.

Social Welfare

Although today there is a wider recognition of the importance of women in the process of development, our prevailing nature of interventions toward them is welfare-oriented rather than income-generating. Social welfare projects or "female"" components in projects (for example, maternal and child health, family planning, hygiene, nutrition, home economics, and gardening) focus mainly on the domestic role of women as homemakers and mothers, succumbing to the fiction of a constant "household" with a male breadwinner. Such interventions, as important as they are, do not meet with success in getting women out of poverty, nor do they alter the fundamental problem of women's dependence on conjugal ties for access to resources. Income-generating projects, in contrast, try to create a situation that helps women support themselves and their families without welfare.

They involve upgrading existing skills or teaching new ones, providing the resources needed to use the skills in the production of marketable goods and services, providing marketing assistance, promoting wage employment, raising awareness of the root causes of poverty, teaching functional and legal literacy, and encouraging women to participate in community-level decision-making. Integration Sri Lankan women's issues are often perceived superficially and they are, at best, grouped together with issues that affect the rural sector in general. In other cases women are considered an underprivileged group, according to the same line of reasoning that sees handicapped children and juvenile delinquents as welfare cases.

Actions to benefit women are still too often confined solely to the social sphere, ignoring the economic and political dimensions. The causes of discrimination and the very real marginalization that women suffer are not explicitly identified, leaving women's true situation unknown and unrevealed. Women's integration in development tends, therefore, is to be seen as a political catch-phrase that sets the tone for the overall approach, rather than as an indispensable element of any sustainable development. From this, it is hardly surprising that our national policy-makers and authorities are not concerned about integrating women into development whenever they design programmes and projects.

If the Government genuinely wishes for fuller integration of women in development, it should seek a wide variety of concerned, interested and involved institutions for support. These include- non-governmental bodies, national, international and private institutions, associations and donor agencies; and professional organizations. As we look ahead, it is important to remember that investments in women are sound investment in a country's future. Investments in women's education and training and support services that enable women to balance their work and family responsibilities, are investments that benefit women and their families. Advancing the status of women isn't just a social and moral issue. It is also an economic imperative.

It is in this respect that the specific Government policies and programs should contain four strands: 1. Access to and participation of women on the labour market; 2. The setting up of commercial organisations run by women; 3. Financial tools; 4. Education and vocational training. 1. Access to and participation of women on the labour market We must create a monitoring tool for equality in labour legislation based on statistical objectives and support and strengthen women's organisations, which monitor the promotion of equality for women and men and their equal access to economic, social and cultural freedoms.

We must improve and recognize informal female employment's image and turn it professional and identify professional job creation sectors and develop measures to increase and improve opportunities.

2 The setting up of commercial organisations run by women We must create supporting structures to stimulate women's enterprises ( e.g. business schools for women, one stop information centres, co-operatives) and develop tools to professionalize the work and the products of women (marketing, quality, design)

3. Financial tools We must develop tools to monitor credit development and the distribution of financial resources in relation to enterprises run by women and support measures to develop and sustain micro-credit initiatives by initiating commercial partnerships between banks, investment institutions and women business associations.

4. Education and vocational training We must develop instruments (e.g. mentoring and coaching) to widen the vocational training system embracing all knowledge and professions (new technologies and engineering) and to take into account the specific situation of women. Social Justice Of course, the "status of women" as well as the factors that confer status vary considerably across a society. A woman's status is often described in terms of her income, employment, education, health, and fertility, as well as the roles she plays within the family, the community and society. It also involves society's perception of these roles and the value it places on them.

The status of women implies a comparison with the status of men, and is therefore a significant reflection of the level of social justice in a society. Sri Lanka's sustainable development efforts rely on women - half of country's population, fulfilling crucial roles at household and professional level - to take an active part in them. Women are conscious producers, concerned consumers, good businesspeople and creators of technological alternatives. The well-known slogan "educate a woman and you empower a family, a nation, the world" should be combined with "empower women and engender environmental decision-making for a sustainable future".

As technological and social change move at an ever-increasing pace, as we increasingly learn to think of ourselves as a "learning society," as the notion of lifelong learning becomes ever more integrated into our expectations as a world community, women must not be left behind. But history suggests that women will be left behind doing the data entry, the clerical data-retrieval, the non-technical service jobs and facing a lifetime of lower earnings, lower retirement benefits, and greater risk of poverty if we do not act positively to ensure that women are included in these changes.

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