Issues in women’s empowerment

Women’s issues have acquired so great an importance that we could today unreservedly say that the steady empowerment of women is a true benchmark of a country’s development. That is, if women are not satisfactorily represented in our legislatures and provided their essentials for effective and productive living, a country’s development could be considered as stymied. This is an honest but bitter truth which must be countenanced by a country’s decision-makers.

In South Asia, Sri Lanka is seen as a thriving and dynamic democracy but an unfortunate anomaly that is threatening to ‘stare us out of countenance’ is the fact that there are only a handful of women legislators, whereas women constitute some 53 percent of our population. One cannot jump to the conclusion on the basis of this statistic that we have in Sri Lanka an undeveloped democracy, but the observer is reminded of the truth that democratic development, like most other things, is a process and that it needs to be persisted with until all sections of a society are empowered to the maximum. Accordingly, the issue of women’s empowerment must be increasingly addressed and remedied by the state in particular, rather than being considered an issue of irrelevance to democratic advancement.

We in Sri Lanka are increasingly confronted by the evidence that women could constitute the agents of progressive and beneficial change. At the risk of sounding somewhat sexist we could say, that today in this country, women are leading from the front in jobs which were seen as male preserves. For instance, a bulk of the reconstruction and rehabilitation effort in the North is shouldered by female Divisional Secretaries and we have the evidence of our eyes that they are performing exceptionally well in their jobs. It could be said with some certainty that there are no ‘men’s or women’s worlds.’ It is simply that, thus far, women have not been provided the complete range of opportunities to prove themselves in full.

This being the case, women should be sufficiently empowered to give of their best to the national development effort. Given that they are highly underrepresented in Parliament, the time is ripe to bring in the relevant constitutional arrangements to ensure that this anomaly is rectified to the extent possible. Allocating a specific quota of seats for women in our legislature, for example, is a matter worth considering, besides other empowering mechanisms.

While it is true that Sri Lanka has produced a woman Prime Minister and a woman President, one cannot argue, therefore, that women’s participation in politics is noteworthy. On the contrary, women’s participation in politics is at a low ebb, and this is contributing to the relative powerlessness of local women. But it is of the first importance that the female component of our population is given every opportunity to empower itself.

Besides doing away with all the barriers that get in the way of the educational and career advancement of women, the latter need to be encouraged to participate to a greater degree in this country’s politics, because without sufficient representation in our legislature, women would not be in a position to influence law-making in ways that would bring about their empowerment. Therefore, women need to increasingly run for office at the local, provincial and national levels.

All this cannot be achieved overnight. A long, hard struggle awaits the female population but the process must begin and there needs to be greater public discourse on these issues. No doubt there are ‘hierarchic structures’ that could be expected to get in the way but it needs to be recognized that without empowerment or the capability to change the structures that hinder their progress, women would not be in a position to lead a dignified existence. For instance, we would be stating the obvious by saying that violence against women is currently high in this country. Such violence has a dehumanizing impact on women who are treated with great respect by almost all the religions practised in this country.

It is the perception that they are a weak sex that is driving this wave of violence against women. A steady empowerment of women would help to change this perception and enable them to lead dignified lives. What is of importance here is dignity and self-respect and these are attributes that mark off humans as a supreme product of the historical process.