Do we hound women out of leadership or are they victims beyond redemption?

It would appear that women in leadership are required to know people if they are to survive in high public office in present-day Kenya.

Although there have been more men than women caught on the wrong side of the law, women have had to take the greatest flak, including being required to vacate office in the event of a scandal.

Where they have not allowed themselves to be ushered into unemployment with decorum, they have been dragged out screaming and kicking.

In a case or two, they have become unemployable because the distinction between their identities and their reputations is so blurred it has become non-existent.

I have in mind women like Nancy Baraza, Gladys Shollei, and now, Charity Ngilu.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that women in positions of power are under greater scrutiny than their male counterparts and that the court of public opinion holds them to higher standards of compliance than it does men. 

And where they fall short of these standards, the court has had no qualms passing a guilty verdict at short notice and sending them to inflation as we say these days when people lose their jobs.

Because their reputations are, so to speak, in tatters by the time they are hounded out of office, it invariably becomes harder for them to find alternative employment especially in public office.

And that is where the danger lies because if this becomes the norm, then there is a risk of making highly-visible public offices unattractive to women, even those who qualify and are otherwise good people who mean well for this country. In the long run, the nation will sorely miss the talent such leaders inject into high office. 

This is not to say that the women who have been required to leave office in the wake of scandals in the recent past can hold a candle to Caesar’s wife. Nor does it mean they are being targeted solely on the basis of their gender.

However, we might need someone with greater knowledge of these matters to decipher what is actually happening and whether the emerging trend is a passing cloud or part of our new national culture.

These experts should also tell us whether a time will come when we will, as a country, cheer women on to greater achievement.

For the time being, what is worrying — and what we need to talk about before matters get out of hand — is the frequency with which women are being eased out of public office. Does gender have anything to do with their tribulations?

If it is purely coincidental, then we should ask ourselves whether we have treated their male counterparts the same way because one has to strain one’s memory to remember which man was hounded out of office under similarly acrimonious circumstances. 

And because Kenyans like to travel to other countries to study best practices, we can dispatch several delegations to find out whether what we are doing is the best practice internationally. 

If it is, we can accept and move on and ask our gifted women to do the same. If it is not, we need to seriously ask ourselves what is happening and whether this is right.

The English say that if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. The gender duck has been quacking for some time. That is why we must talk about it and decide whether what we are doing is a deliberately targeted campaign or we are dealing with each case solely on the basis of merit and the law.

Although the Constitution provides that we reserve at least 30 per cent of public positions to either gender — read women — this has been observed more in the breach. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled that we can achieve this threshold progressively, which to some, can also mean at leisure.

Even in instances when this rule has been observed, it comes across more as tokenism and not something inspired by our national DNA.

And partly because many of the women in leadership have been intimidated by being linked to scandal, their voices have been muffled or silenced altogether because those who dare to speak up today risk being ostracised — or slapped — tomorrow. 

If you ask me, this is not the way to build a modern society in which, as Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe would have said, we let the eagle perch and we let the kite perch too.

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