I spend a lot of time asking questions about numbers. The low numbers of women in political leadership and why such inequity seems to matter so little. The high numbers of women in low-waged, insecure, nonunionised, informal work, and why such clustering seems to change too slowly or barely at all.
The low numbers of women who own property in their own name, only about 15 per cent in Trinidad and Tobago, and how that limits their options in life. The high number women who experience any form of violence, from sexual harassment on the street to death at the hands of intimate partners, and the explanations that seem sufficient amidst popular perception that equality has been already won.
Those numbers reveal clear realities. Equality has not been won. Decades of women's work has been allowed to have only partial effect on dismantling institutionalised male domination and the status afforded to dominant ideals of manhood. The pace of securing rights and justice is indefensibly slow. We desperately need transformational leadership to stop us from repeating these mistakes of the past.
What makes such leadership transformational is not simply its individually empowered or empowering qualities. It is that it is committed to working to end all hierarchies on the basis of sex, gender or sexuality, and their role in reinforcing asymmetries of access to or allocation of status, power and material resources. It is that it recognises these asymmetries are deeply entrenched in political parties, elite business culture, the economy and households, as well as in law, religion and media.
Transformation doesn't mean strategising to get to the top, but using whatever power you get to lessen the pains and losses of the majority in public life. It means recognising that class doesn't protect any of us from destruction of the commons, whether in relation to public drinking water, public hospitals, public safety or an ecology that our children are systematically being denied. All of us, in the end, live downstream of the poisons, whether social problems or environmental pollution, that we do not fix today.
I've become impatient at how little social, economic, environmental or gender justice we seem to achieve. How infrequently those with the most power act decisively to democratise this small place, in the widest sense of what that means to each of us. I struggle to remain optimistic while watching influential anti-feminist discourses, which first denied women's right to choice, freedom and authority because of 'tradition', morph into more contemporary anti-feminist discourses, which now deny that women need more choice, freedom and authority than they have.
Masculinism is the currently popular, if empirically wrong, position that "men are in crisis and suffering because of women in general and feminists in particular", with the solution involving "curbing the influence of feminism and revalorising masculinity". We have seen this in "ongoing attempts by institutions and individuals to maintain conditions of women's inequality", from successive prime ministers failure to engender budgets to successive adult men married to girls under sixteen.
More girls are graduating from UWI? More women are managers? Didn't we have one woman Prime Minister? Aren't women the backbone of political parties? These numbers tell us little about why legislation, draft gender policies and gendered bureaucracies haven't become transformational leadership tools in women's hands. They also tell us little about why manhood remains defined by privilege when it is everyone's work, not simply women's, to make the world less violent, less exclusionary, and less unfairly waged for women.
As Caribbean scholars point out, "Ongoing projects of nation-state building that promote allegedly gender free notions of nationalist cohesion should be contested and unmasked as skillful projections of modern masculine political power". Note, secondly, "a welfarist modus operandi of 'what you are doing for women'" cannot substitute for "addressing the more critical question of 'how we are creating systemic change for women'" and their communities.
The numbers regarding women's lives do not show a transformed reality. Individual empowerment and charity aren't enough when beliefs and structures still protect inequality. Referenda and consultations that go nowhere are excuses, for rights are not won through popularity. Transformational leadership isn't an idea. It is a necessity yet to be achieved.
Powerful women out there, who's ready?