More Men Convinced to Join Gender Equality Call
It Benefits Them More Than It Appears to be Threatening
Jun 15, 2009
Jerry, 40, loves to take care of his two children and do house chores like cooking and gardening. "It is equally rewarding to spend my days with my kids as it is to be paid for extra hours of work," he says.
Unlike his father, Jerry was present during the birth of his two children and spent more hours in child rearing. He works as card dealer at the casino in Las Vegas for four days while the rest of the week is for his wife and children.
"I believe that men and women are created equal and therefore share same rights and responsibilities, as parents, individuals, or as workers. We are all the same," he said.
Sweden's Daddy Days
In Sweden, among the leading countries where gender equality is being institutionalized, 90 percent of men have availed of the state policy on "Daddy Days", says a research study by sociologist Dr. Michael Kimmel of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The state encourages men to take a leave to be a part of their children's first months.
"That is a government that has family values. Americans have so much to learn from Europeans, especially Nordic countries, in their efforts to involve men in family life," he said in his study entitled "Why Men Should Support Gender Equality".
Closing the Gender Gap
The UN Global Gender Gap Report of 2007 noted that Sweden, Norway, and Finland were the top three countries in the world which have closed the gap between men and women for about 80 percent and have become a useful benchmark for international comparisons.
Iceland and New Zealand ranked fourth and fifth in the ranking.
The Philippines is the only country in Asia that has closed the gender gap in education and health. The US ranked 31st in the gender gap report.
The four critical areas of inequality of men and women that were measured by the study were on economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment, and health and survival.
Gender Fairness
While it used to only be the women calling for the recognition of their rights, now men are joining the call.
In the quite localities of Cebu, in Central Philippines, a group of males are campaigning against violence against women and children, realizing that men have to take part in reorienting the age-old patriarchal culture they were born into.
The Philippine group, called Men Opposed to Violence Against Women and Children (MOVAWC), was initiated in the mid 1990s by Dr. Melanio Sanchez, a medical doctor by profession and executive director of the Kauswagan Community Health Services, the community extension service arm of the Cebu Doctors University.
Kauswagan provides affordable health services for the community's poor women in rural Cebu, particularly on reproductive health and nutrition.
The Kauswagan staff noticed that 95percent of the women they attend to had been abused or battered. This led Sanchez to question if the men were really the source of all problems on women's reproductive health and sexuality.
Sanchez probed into the deeper causes of domestic violence, sharing an insight that men tend to be violent "because it was the way how society requires them to behave. That men are superior and women are inferior."
Sanchez thus believed that men were also victims of society's norms. He thought that women's liberation from gender oppression and exploitation has to involve the liberation of men who are also imprisoned by their own gender roles.
In 1997, he invited local professionals in law, universities, and the medical field, as well as public officials, to a meeting that was to become the precursor of the formation of MOVAWC.
Those meetings came a long way. Today, Kauswagan is in the forefront of the movement against domestic violence in southeast Asian countries of Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
The local government too has begun to institutionalize programs that monitor and curb domestic violence in the village level. Government budget has been provided to make an inventory of cases on maltreatment, form a monitoring group on domestic violence, an information-sharing network, and an education forum to educate young men on gender and domestic violence and the role of men.
In mid-2004, a report of the Marie Stoppes International which partners local government and NGOs in Cebu indicated that there was an observed reduction of cases and complaints related to gender-based violence in the communities of Cebu.
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