What we want is more, much more

Last month I asked whether "women were advancing or regressing". I had been mulling over the problem for a while, but I had done so in isolation. It is unfortunate that we women have not yet managed to solidify a united front to win our battles.

This sentence would already have scared off the feeble among us. Talk of fighting is not considered 'feminine', or so society has led us to believe, and sadly, many women still believe this.

Now when I talk of fighting I do not mean the shrieking 'fishwife' variety (why fishwives should have been chosen as yet another handle to denigrate women is not within the remit of this article, but I must say that the fishwife I often buy fish from is quietly spoken and writes poetry).

I mean fighting on an intellectual level, and you do not need to be an academic or even have a degree to do that.

Many men of course think we have nothing to fight about, they think we are whingers and whiners and should just accept that we do not get on because we are just not good enough, otherwise there is nothing to stop us.

If you believe in fairytales, that should reassure you. I don't. I have seen too many good women put down, treated disrespectfully and bypassed by less able men to believe that talent and hard work gets women to the top.

Most of the handful that have managed have done so through political connections. So should we carry on accepting the crumbs or are we going to ask for more, much more?

I must admit that isolation breeds despondency, and it was a seminar organised last month by the Guzè Ellul Mercer Foundation that made me realise that I was not the only one concerned with the way women's situation was worsening.

Women from both major political parties voiced their dissatisfaction with women's advancement, or rather the lack of it. The fact that we still did not have one female judge, and that although we have a large representation of women in most professions, they are still not getting the professorships, headships and directorships, was universally decried.

I came back to Malta in 1992 after a long absence and was dismayed at how little women had achieved. Juries were all male and I remember being shocked at discovering that there was only one female professor at the University, Marie Therese Camilleri Podestà.

To my surprise, when I asked her for an interview she told me that no-one had ever approached her or seemed interested. Things have improved on both those fronts; we now have female representation on our juries and do see many more women interviewed on their achievements.

Anyway, back then it really looked like the politicians were taking a serious interest in improving women's lot in the workplace and society in general. The Commission for the Advancement of Women (CAW) had been set up in 1989 and we got our first woman chairperson, Bernadette Borda. It looked like things were moving.

We started getting a few women on boards, and the media were creating awareness. Our newspaper carried extensive profiles on all the women parliamentary candidates in the 1996 election and we managed to increase representation in Parliament from one in 1992 (Giovanna Debono, PN) to four in 1996 (Helena Dalli and Marija Camilleri, MLP; Giovanna Debono and Helen D'Amato, PN) and increased the number to six in 1998 (Giovanna Debono, Helen D'Amato and Dolores Cristina, PN; Helena Dalli, MarieLouise Coleiro and Rita Law, MLP).

We got a Parliamentary Secretariat for Women under the last Labour administration, which the following PN administration did not deem necessary. We got the first mainstream woman (parastatal) chairperson. Marlene Mizzi at Sea Malta under the Labour administration 1996-98, who currently still holds the post, and another woman, Marisa Micallef Leyson, a PN parliamentary candidate, at the Housing Authority, when the Nationalists got back into government.

However, it seems that the advancement of women was the flavour of the Nineties. Come the 21st century, the taste to promote women was losing its tang.

No more women were selected as magistrates. There are still only four women magistrates a third of the total of magistrates. We still have not seen any headway at the university, in medicine, in business and elsewhere - a flash in the pan - was Dr Cecilia Attard Pirotta's appointment as Malta's first resident woman ambassador (to Spain).

But besides only having a token number of women at decision-making level we also have a very low number of women participating in the workforce as a whole.

And that is worrying the politicians, just like women were accepted in the non-traditional workplace when the men went to war. Women are now needed to boost ailing economies and to bridge the welfare gap. The EU is calling for "all hands on deck".

However, looking at the last budget locally, they don't seem to have made their minds up whether they want women in the workplace by subsidising child care facilities, or back in the home by providing incentives for bigger families, "an increase in children's allowance for those with three children and more".

Women are going to need more than subsidised childcare facilities if they are going to have to cope with larger families and substantial employment outside the house.

Another concern is highlighted in the conclusions in the chapter on "gender and employment" in a newly released book, The Unequal Half, by Mario Vassallo, Lydia Sciriha and Maja Miljanic Brinkworth, commissioned by CAW.

"The propensity of female workers to work is such as to make them willing to accept jobs in the hope that income improvements would come afterwards. Work has an intrinsic utility for female workers; just working is more important to them than the income work generates".

This is hardly surprising since women have been supplying unpaid work for centuries. But it gets worse: "Apart from flexibility, this inclination to work at lower wages could elicit a wider response from the female population to a demand for labour which male workers would be prepared for a time to stay away from.

"It could be the measure that could see female workers substituting male workers in the future... The option of females substituting male workers was not considered by the writers of the Ramboll Report who envisaged female workers complementing male workers...

"...Substitution by gender rather than complimentary is the more probable situation in the labour market in Malta in the future, provided that legislation and the network of services supporting the family do not militate against it.

"The propensity to work and the income of the male Maltese worker may be slow to adapt to changing labour market realities giving female employment the edge it needs to expand."

Hardly the edge to expand. The risk of regression is what I am reading in that extract. CAW should be concerned. What is being suggested is that female workers fill the gap of jobs males do not accept because of low pay, since they will work for less remuneration until pay levels rise and "the time to stay away" by the men is up.

CAW would be better advised to demand equal pay audits to ensure women get the same remuneration as men for performing the same job. I believe this forms part of new EU strategy if I understood Professor Patricia Leighton correctly in her lively, thought-provoking presentation at the National Council of Women seminar, "Equality standards for an improved workplace", on Friday.

Professor Leighton, who wrote "Maximising talent for the public service", a strategy for increasing the representation of women in decision-making positions in the Maltese public service, last February, started off her presentation by asking: "Are Maltese women lazy?"

Since her audience was mainly women, with the usual sprinkling of men at such occasions, it made them sit up and listen to what this foreigner, implying that it might be female laziness that is the cause of the lowest female participation in the workplace in Europe, had to say.

Of course just as The Unequal Half told us women enjoy work so much that job satisfaction comes before financial reward, Professor Leighton knew full well that laziness was not the reason.

She went on to demolish three reasons women are usually fobbed off with when complaining of discrimination.

1. "Time, things will get better with time".

"Not only have things not got better; with time they have got worse".

2. "Education/skills, the higher the quality of education of women the more able they are to achieve parity.

"Not true. After a few years in the same profession, male graduates progress faster and earn more than their female counterparts.

3. Women do better when they dominate the sector. "This is not supported by data", said Professor Leighton.

What I like about her is that she gives out these messages of gloom and doom with an impish grin, implying that despite the setbacks we shall get there, but only if we get radical and put up a fight.

That is why despite the cynicism, what I heard ironically cheered me. Maybe women will now start believing what some of us have been saying for a long time, stop accepting the rhetoric and unite to ensure women get the power to share in the decisions that affect all our lives.