Aspiring women leaders being let down by running mate mentality
The late Wangari Maathai Statue in the US. PHOTO | WWW.BILLHOPEN.COM
What you need to know:
- It is hard to tell. Certainly, there are few fields women do not excel these days, right from academia to the workplace. Nobody but an incurable misogynist can, with a straight face, consign women to the menial chores traditionally associated with them right from their girlhood.
- While due to their biological attributes women have always been more vulnerable than men where the issue of physical strength is concerned — hence the “weaker sex” epithet — I don’t believe that this obtains in every case.
- So long as women hide behind hackneyed stereotypes and victimhood to cover their lack of guts, they will keep crying in the wilderness about the vileness of male chauvinists who can never give them a break.
On Sunday, the world marks the International Day of Women. It is the day we are supposed to celebrate the achievements of our wives, mothers, sisters, aunts and daughters.
We rarely do it unless the daughters perform well in the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education examination or at university, but that is no matter.
The United Nations set aside the day for a specific purpose.
But why should women require a special day when their achievements — and failures — are already recognised? Why is it not taken for granted that women are similar to men in almost everything that matters, the only difference being their anatomy? Why do men relapse to their parochial and patriarchal mindsets which regard womenfolk to be fit only for giving birth, cooking and washing, the farm, teaching and nursing jobs?
It is hard to tell. Certainly, there are few fields women do not excel these days, right from academia to the workplace. Nobody but an incurable misogynist can, with a straight face, consign women to the menial chores traditionally associated with them right from their girlhood.
Women and girls have made great strides on every front, but they are still not even half-way there in terms of full emancipation. In many cases, school, college and university girls beat their male counterparts in their studies.
MANAGE THINK-TANKS
A number now head universities, others manage think-tanks, while others run listed companies. So what is with this supposedly elusive elective office?
As a young man, I was chagrined when my sister beat me by seven points in the Form Four exams. Years before that, a plucky girl beat me in the Standard Seven examination.
Unfortunately, she chose to go into nursing and concentrate on delivering other people’s babies when today she would perhaps be a professor of entomology, embryology or some other profession.
This is just an illustration of the socialisation that has kept girls and women down for centuries on end.
While due to their biological attributes women have always been more vulnerable than men where the issue of physical strength is concerned — hence the “weaker sex” epithet — I don’t believe that this obtains in every case.
Back to the International Women’s Day.
It is a fact that Kenyan women have made great strides in all areas of human endeavour.
Unfortunately, one of these is not in the realm of elective office where they lag behind so badly that we are in danger of becoming the continent’s laughing stock.
Simple statistics will suffice. Of the 350 members of the National Assembly, only 68 are women, a number of whom have been nominated by political parties. Of the 68 senators, only 18 are women, all of them having been nominated to fulfil some quota.
PATHETIC SITUATIONS
As for women governors, the situation is pathetic. None of them was elected on their own three years ago; the nine who are at the apex of the counties were elected by hanging on to the coat-tails of male colleagues.
Does that mean that no woman is qualified to hold the top position in county governments? I don’t think so.
After all, since the days Grace Onyango and Phoebe Asiyo stood for Parliament and beat their male colleagues, to the days Charity Ngilu, Wangari Maathai and Martha Karua stood for President, there has been no dearth of women with enough courage to vie for political office.
So long as women hide behind hackneyed stereotypes and victimhood to cover their lack of guts, they will keep crying in the wilderness about the vileness of male chauvinists who can never give them a break.
What they don’t realise is that nobody will hand over political power to them on a platter. Even those elected as women’s reps had to prove themselves one way or the other.
In some ways, women are their own enemies. They seem to have a “running mate” mentality which acutely hobbles their aspirations. If they believe the best they can do is to make deputy governors or MCAs, then that is all they will ever be, and this country will be the poorer for it.
