Ladies and gentlemen, kindly check yourselves

I wasn’t going to write a column about International Women’s Day. We all know the score, I said to myself. Yes, the biggest economy in the world elected a hate-mongering, lying pussy-grabber-in-chief because that’s better than a smart, strident lady-president, but Harvey Weinstein is in jail, we’ve reached parity on primary school enrolments, and maternal mortality rates have dropped by 45%.

So maybe there are only 10 women leading governments compared to 183 men; maybe less than 6% of CEOs at stock exchange companies are female – but we’re generally making progress, right? Except that nearly nine out of 10 people are still biased against women.

Except that 28% of the world still thinks domestic violence is okay. Except that, based on current trends, it will take 257 years to close the economic gender gap, because gender inequality persists in every country in the world.

This all came to light in the massive study just released by the United Nations Development Programme, the gender social norms index, analysing international research collated over 10 years, taking in 75 countries and more than 80% of the world’s population.

Fact is a mere 12.72% of the world – both male and female – hold no bias against women. And, shamefully, South Africa is one of the countries where the population’s attitude towards women actually deteriorated during the decade of data collection, so much so that now only 4.54% of women and 2.76% of men are chauvinism-free.

I’m definitely one of those enlightened folk, you might be saying – I’ve nothing against women, even when they’re being a bit shrill and emotional. Maybe. But are you one of the more than 40% who think men make better business executives?

Are you one of the over 50% who consider men better political leaders, and who think men have more right to employment when jobs are scarce? Do you believe women should have physical integrity over their own bodies?

We women are screwed over even before we’ve started – by men, yes, but also by ourselves, by what we’re told about ourselves from the moment we are born. Ladies and gentlemen, kindly check yourselves.

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