International women’s day is being celebrated around the world but in reality gender inequality or the preferably useful word called gender equity is far from being achieved. What the world currently celebrates is what could be.
The world currently celebrates women who broke barriers and obstacles, which is quite okay but the goal should be working towards removing those barriers and obstacles as that is worth celebrating.
However, removing those obstacles and barriers is not a one day job and what it means is that in as much as Communication and the celebration of women who broke barriers is important so that more woman can be inspired, what is worth taking are actions that would make the environment easy for any gender to thrive.
Companies, governments, businesses, individuals, and all sorts of institutions and programmes all claim to be gender-neutral on paper but in reality, the opposite is true.
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They communicate about how they accept talented and skill individuals regardless of gender but their policies and actions speak otherwise. How can communication be effective without the right policies and programmes to back it up.
While both genders suffer from this discrimination when it comes to hiring and retention of talents. The marginalized gender is the females who are suffering from gender bias from different aspects of their life including their workplace. The preferential treatment given to the other gender in places of work tends to reduce competitiveness and quality of output.
This reduction in competitiveness and quality of output can be seen in various sectors where equality and diversity are not being embraced. The lack of diversity and equality reduces the quality of policies generated by the Government, the kind of results that private firms get, and at the basic level, it affects the quality of decisions made in a family.
She can’t be in this conversation, she can’t live alone, she is too weak, this job is not for a woman and so many other utterances are part of how we sideline women and young girls, we don’t it many a time unconsciously and it has become part of the way we think and act towards the opposite gender.
These utterances also come from women who think other women shouldn’t do or act in certain manner, many have claimed that women hate women, why this might not look believable, the hating might not be because she is a fellow woman, it can borne out of hatred for her personality and beyond that, because women are being taught and groomed not to aspire for certain things or take certain actions, whenever they see another breaking away from that herd mentality, there is a tendency for envy and great dislike.
The deliberate elimination of the marginalized gender is a contempt against competence and if allowed to continue, it would keep on eating into the fabric of our society and creating the platform for incompetence to thrive.
