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| Wednesday, 2 March 2005 |
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Women's seats and the equality debate Gender Dialogue by Nadira Gunatilleke Very often pregnant women and mothers with infants or babies get on to buses and commuters offer their seats to them. Sometimes they get seats, but sometimes they don't. Whenever they get seats nothing happens but when they do not get a seat "the war" starts inside public transport services. At the end, the relevant mother and her baby receive the sympathy of the public while the person who did not give his seat or the person who gave up his seat after receiving reasonable or unreasonable blame, gets the scolding. Will this 'sympathy' towards women do any good to promote gender equality? Nobody discusses this matter due to social pressure but it should be discussed in public because this regular incident that takes place almost in all buses has a strong impact on gender equality. How can we expect equal treatment from society while taking unnecessary advantages using gender? Do all the mothers who get on to public transport services carrying their children deserve seats? This is the main issue that should be discussed. Some mothers who are carrying their infants get on to buses just before the bus starts its journey from the bus stand with full seats. They can very easily get a seat if they get on to the next bus which is usually scheduled to start its journey just a few minutes after from the first bus. They can do this without troubling another passenger for no reason. But this does not happen in our present society and everybody is ready to blame the innocent passenger, may be a patient or a feeble person who desperately needs to sit down. Another common problem is, sometimes young mothers get into buses carrying their grown-up children, but pretending that they are `just born infants'. They expect anybody who is seated close to the entrance to give up his or her seat for her. May be she is carrying her six years or older child who can easily stand or sit with a seated passenger. Then what about the poor passenger who is being forced to give up his or her seat? May be he or she is an innocent passenger who cannot travel without a seat. May be he or she is carrying a heavy load of bags. Some mothers do not take even a file belonging to the passenger who sacrificed the seat for her. But most of the time the public talks only about the bad behaviour of the poor passengers and not about the impolite behaviour of such mothers. May be the passenger is old and feeble or just too tired to stand up. Most of the time such passengers spend hours in bus queues just to obtain a seat. When a mother or a pregnant woman gets into a bus she should directly go to the seat which is reserved for her by pasting a special notice and ask for the seat from the passenger who sits on that specific seat. She can easily do this because the seat is always located next to the entrance. When this method comes into effect the passengers who desperately need a seat will not sit on that specific seat because they know that it is reserved and they are liable to offer that seat even without a request. Even at present most of the passengers practise this. Meanwhile the relevant authorities of the transport services should also take necessary steps to reserve a comfortable seat (probably close to the entrance) for the benefit of mothers and pregnant women. The problem is totally different in the air conditioned private buses. Most of the time mothers carrying children, and the pregnant women do not get into such buses, simply because people do not give up their seats for them, which they have obtained by paying a bigger amount of money, always more than Rs. 35.00, which is `a lot of money' for ordinary passengers. Mothers know this through experiences. There are no specific seats reserved for a mother in these buses. There is no debate that pregnant women and mothers require seats in buses but taking unfair advantage of the 'condition' will not do any good for gender equality. |
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