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Bearing the Burden of Culture: Pru Goward (2002)

Sex Discrimination

Bearing the Burden of Culture

Speech delivered by Pru Goward,
Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner at the Unifem Australia Reception,
Brisbane City Hall, Brisbane, 24 October 2002

Lord Mayor Jim Soorley,
City Councillors present, May Lamont, UNIFEM Chairperson, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Thank you for inviting
me here this evening. It is a great honour to have been asked to address
this year's UNIFEM Australia reception.

Standing in this
room with all of you here tonight, it's great pleasure to see that in
Australia we have so many women committed to furthering the rights of
women not only in our country, but also globally.

Thanks to your commitment,
women in Australia remain a vital part of today's global women's movement.

We so often hear
that feminism is dead - that young women today aren't interested in it;
that it is no longer relevant to their lives.

We hear that older
women have 'done their time'; that the 'battles' they fought have now
been won.

Yet despite its professed
death, today no movement in the world today is comparable to the women's
movement - it is alive, powerful and tenacious.

Year after year it
is a tide that keeps on turning.

Sometimes it's a
Tsunami - an event will occur which captures global attention and sees
advocates of women's rights all around the world unite, in force, to respond
to an injustice.

Take the world wide
outrage expressed at the sentencing to death by stoning of Amina Lawal
in Nigeria.

Most of the time
however it operates as waves do - pounding, continual and unrelenting.

There are rarely
still waters.

And it is growing.

Look at UNIFEM for
example.

Since its creation
in 1976, it has grown into a network that spans over 100 countries.

It has 14 Regional
Programme Directors and a growing network of affiliated gender advisors
and specialists in Africa, the Arab States, Asia and the Pacific, Central
and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States, Latin America
and the Caribbean.

While in a perfect
world there would be no need for such a strong women's movement, in our
world - a world where women continue to be stoned to death; subject to
dowry burnings; forced into arranged marriages; and exist as women in
patriarchal structures - there is.

That the movement
still thrives globally is a reason for delight for women, like yourselves,
who have dedicated time to fostering and nurturing the movement.

As Federal Sex Discrimination
Commissioner, it gives me great pleasure to know I stand united with women
around the world in the work that I do.

This is not to suggest
that around the world there is a homogenous group of women advocating
their rights, and the rights of their sisters.

Nor is it to suggest
that advocating women's rights means the same thing around the world.

What it does suggest
is that globally women's rights are still vulnerable.

Everywhere
we feel a need to protect them.

In most countries,
women's rights remain an intangible concept - the challenge remains making
them something concrete.

In Australia we are
lucky in this respect.

We have strong Federal
and State anti-discrimination legislation making gender based discrimination
unlawful. This legislation often goes further than just prohibiting certain
behaviour.

One of the objects
of the Sex Discrimination Act for example is to promote the recognition
and acceptance within the community of the principle of equality of men
and women.

This means that in
my role as Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner, I have the legislative
backing to move beyond dealing with more limited anti-discrimination issues
into broader equality agenda.

This provides a platform
for action. My contribution, as Sex Discrimination Commissioner, to the
national debate we are currently having on paid maternity leave arises
because a national scheme of paid maternity, in addressing issues of workplace
disadvantage, will promote the equality of women in Australia today.

Having in place this
national legislative framework that enshrines women's rights at a domestic
level often lets us think we are off the hook.

But we are not.

The rights of women
in Australia remain vulnerable, as we are faced with the same fundamental
challenge as women around the world - we bear the burden of culture.

In theory, culture
incorporates men and women.

In practice however,
it is women who have their behaviour regulated by culture in a way that
often puts at risk their physical well being, health and security.

This is a universal
experience, even though for women, bearing the burden of culture means
very different things in different countries.

It is the cultural,
religious, social, political and economic realities of a country that
will determine how this burden manifests.

However, as the world
becomes a 'smaller place'; as access to information means that we are
more aware of what is happening to women not only in our neighbouring
countries, but in countries around the world, we cannot ignore how this
burden manifests itself here and in other different countries - especially
when it sits uncomfortably with our universal system of women's
rights and human rights.

The recent sentencing
of Amina Lawal to death by stoning, a suitable punishment under traditional
Shari'ah law, for becoming pregnant out of wedlock is an example of this.
It is a horrific case, and one that has captured international media attention,
however let's not forget that it is only one such example of the vulnerable
position women around the world find themselves in everyday.

In Africa for example,
bearing the burden of culture may mean undergoing female genital mutilation.
This seriously jeopardises the health of a woman, and may result in her
death, yet these concerns come second when weighed up against the cultural
need to ensure her marriageability.

Arranged marriages
for young girls, are a cultural norm in countries such as India. While
tradition, family and communal existence and cultural practice dictate
that this happen, it reinforces that a women's life is a mere commodity
to be traded with and bargained for.

That dowry burnings
remain a common occurrence highlights the vulnerable position of women
in marriage in India.

In Australia we see
Aboriginal women bearing the burden of culture as the arranged marriage
of a 15 year old girl to a 50 year old man in the Northern Territory comes
under public scrutiny.

The challenge in
this situation, as in many of these situations, lies in finding where
women and girls sits amidst often conflicting systems of law. In this
case, customary, national and international human rights law - each which
has something to say about her body and her rights.

Each purports to
protect some part of her identity.

Universal trends
also clash with culture. A clash from which women in Australia are not
exempt.

For example, we live
in a world which makes money a necessity for survival.

Access to money is
usually equated with access to paid work and bearing the burden of culture
often limits women's access to paid work.

It is not surprising
then that women account for as much as 70 per cent of the world's poor,
that globally, the face of poverty is a feminine one. [1]

In Australia for
example, women earn 66 cents in the male dollar from the day they enter
motherhood.

Men and women in
their 20s earn, by contrast, about the same.

Women are more likely
to be dependant on welfare payments, and are more likely to end up poor
in old age.

This is partially
explained by the fact that traditional women's work in whatever form it
takes, be it caring for children, cooking, household chores, tending to
livestock and subsistence crops, goes unpaid.

However, we cannot
ignore that women no longer only perform unpaid work.

Today, women comprise
an increasing share of the world's labour force - at least one third in
all regions except northern Africa and western Asia.

In Australia, women
make up close to 50 per cent of the labour force. [2]

That despite these
high paid workforce participation rates women remain the world's poorest
means that something else is happening.

We need look no further
than within the workforce to see what it is - globally, women remain at
the lower end of segregated labour markets and continue to be concentrated
in a few occupations, to hold positions of little or no authority and
to receive less pay than men.

While, better access
to education, self-employment and part-time and home-based work have expanded
opportunities for women's participation in the labour force, these areas
of employment are characterised by lack of security, lack of benefits,
and low income.

So even those women
who work, still have a greater chance of being poor than men who work.

It is also not surprising
then that globally, prostitution and the trafficking of women is rife
as poverty often drives women into the only form of paid work they can
legitimately access.

Trafficking, as the
concept suggests, is a problem that knows no boundaries. It takes the
poorest and most vulnerable from source countries and delivers them into
the waiting hands of destination countries - be it across the globe, or
in a neighbouring State. They are to be found in brothels from Melbourne
to Marseilles.

Even if we addressed
the worst of these economic inequalities - if women no longer made up
the majority of the world's poor, while we might see the problem of trafficking
recede, we would still see sexual slavery, servitude and trafficking in
women.

Why? Because we live
in a world of power imbalances and dominance relationships which are not
in favour of women.

And these dominance
relationships do not only manifest in acts as sinister as the trafficking
of women. We
need look no further than traditional family arrangements to see how these
power imbalances are a cultural burden that women must bear.

Much of the workplace
disadvantage that women in Australia experience today results from the
fact that women bear children and as such, there is a belief that their
role is in the home, looking after the child while a man's place is in
the workforce. He is the family breadwinner.

When the world operates
in accordance with this norm, this power imbalance may go undetected,
but as soon as there is an attempt to redress this patriarchal structure,
problems arise - women who enter the workforce earn less, find it more
difficult to advance their careers and have to cope with the double burden
of juggling work and mothering.

This highlights the
common failing of dominant culture - the ability to change.

Women everywhere
also bear the burden of what has often been described as a 'culture of
eroticism.' A culture that breeds sexual violence against women, be it
in the form of domestic violence, rape or sexual harassment. This universal
culture permeates and defines the lives of many women around the world.
It forms a part of their everyday experience.

In many ways, women
today continue to be the "packhorses of culture."

Too often boys and
men are allowed and encouraged to embrace the new, modern, Western world,
while the girls and women are seen as the vehicles for and bearers of
cultural continuation.

Lumped with the task
of carrying on often age old traditions, they jeopardise their freedom,
their health, and their security.

Their culture, which
is important to them, often comes into direct conflict with systems of
universal rights and women's rights.

Women and young girls
should not be forced to choose.

The challenge therefore
is finding a place for tradition, culture and women rights in a modern
world, and more specifically in the lives of women - for whom both are
important.


1.
United Nations Population Fund, The State of World Population 2001-
Footprints and Milestones: Population and Environmental Change
, UNFPA,
New York, 2001, as cited in the Commission on Population and Development,
Report of the Secretary-General: The flow of financial resources for
assisting in the implementation of the Programme of Action of the International
Conference on Population and Development
, New York, February 11, 2002,
pages 1-2.

2. ABS 6203.0 Labour Force Australia, August 2001, 26.

Last
updated 31 January 2003.