Let’s Share the Load

 Had the honour of attending a breakfast meeting hosted by the Irish Chamber of Commerce this morning, which was in celebration of International Woman’s Day. The speakers on the panel, were a group of high-powered women, led by the Irish Ambassador to Singapore, Ms. Sarah McGrath. The panelist shared their thoughts on gender equality and the value that it provided organisations. Personal stories were shared and it was on the whole and enjoyable event.

 

However, there was one topic that got missed out – namely the fact that one of the worst proponents against gender equality are women themselves. Token women in positions of power tend to be like all other tokens – keen to preserve their status as the lone one in power and thus work against “their own kind.” The second group of culprits, particularly on the Asian continent, who work actively against gender equality are mothers, who give everything to make life for their sons easy whilst expecting their daughters to slave like dogs.

This point was brought home during my first marriage when my ex-wife was stunned that I knew how to turn on the stove and wash dishes. Her younger brother, who while brilliant academically was totally incapable of turning around and putting the wrapper of his McDonald’s take away in the bin. The reason was simple, my former mother-in-law had made sure that as long as her son was in the house, he’d never need to lift a finger to do anything resembling housework.

This was not a “one-off” freak. As life progressed, I’ve found that this isn’t limited to Singapore. I once met a Vietnamese lady who had a small massage parlour. She was earning money and sending it back home. However, the money she was sending back home was used to support the tobacco and alcohol habits of her brothers. So, in an effort to see her hard-earned money put to good use, she stopped giving money to her brothers and would give money to her mother. However, she ended up cutting off the money to her mother for one simple reason. Her mother would donate every penny she was sending to her brothers who would then keep the booze and tobacco shops in business.

As expected, this “cultural” preference for boys over girls that is enforced by well meaning-mothers has had predictable results. You get capable women and boys who remain boys for the rest of their lives and remain gloriously unable to tie their shoe laces without their mothers. I think of my Padawan whose CV was barely legible. His sister, by contrast, is the wet dream of every Singaporean parent. She’s top of her class in NUS and the big company that she interned in offered her a job at twice the national average salary. I asked him how the hell did things turn out that way. His told me that he is a “pampered” child. As the first and only grandson, his grandparents forbade his father from getting him to do anything. As he admitted “I am very weak,” and it reached the point that I could only advise him to stay healthy and handsome because that was the main thing going for him.

I don’t believe I am the only clown who has met a generation of hopeless mummy’s boys who make foreigners vital to the economy. Gender inequality has a cost to it in that it clearly weakens one sex over another. The importance of solving gender inequality has never been more pressing and it needs to start at the root cause – the way in which parents, specifically mothers pamper their sons at the expense of their daughters. You can have the most beautiful policies in the world but unless you get things settled at the root of the problem, you will only have a group of incapable boy-children that need to be supported by their mothers.

Thankfully there have been efforts made to solve this at the root cause. One of the best advertising campaigns that I can think of was from Ariel which ran a campaign in India. The campaign was called “Share the load together. “One of the ads involved a marriage that was dissolving because after years of having to earn a living and look after the household, the wife had reached the point of “enough.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=youeaZyavg0

 

 There was an even more significant ad, which involved a mother realising the error of her ways when she realised her daughter had to give up her job because she had been married off to a husband who did not know how to do housework and promptly gets her son to do his own laundry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QDlv8kfwIM

 

The message in this campaign was clear. It made the point that gender bias is bad and that parents who propagate this end up doing more harm than good. You will only succeed in tackling gender inequality when you start focusing on homes.