During my school days my mummy sent me to a tuition teacher, an old lady of around 45.Her husband had left her for another woman, so she was left with bringing up three children. So she took home tuitions and around 6o students turned up at her place, half in the morning and half in the evening. I could observe the aging lady getting fatigued and at times she worked even when she had viral infection She taught for nearly 8 hours a day, but that was not enough. She had to toil in the kitchen and bathroom washing clothes and then sweeping the floors….. I think that lady had to work for three hours extra for which she never got a salary. She worked under compulsion but because of her children she loved her work. But there are females across the globe who toil for hours and return home to fulfil domestic duties. They are a counter revolution of industrialization.
When the Industrialization speeded up in the UK, they factories required cheap labour to suit their budgets and get production, so the home makers were encouraged to come out and work, but it required an extra ordinary motivation to convince them to toil in the factories along with doing domestic work. So the theory of women being equal to men was floated and marketed and accepted. Many women were fed up by their alcoholic husbands, who shared only a part of the salary to run their houses thought of a good way to escape to freedom by being away from drunkard husbands. From here they graduated to the corporate world, but their woes increased and it is not yet declared as an epidemic but an overwhelming working women in the west face gender inequality in the terms of salary and promotions as well. Let us study a few testimonies with references so that nobody gets a chance to call us ‘misogynists’
Bureau of Labor Statistics say that women in the US are clustered in 20 of 425 occuptaions listed in their data.
Most of the jobs imagined for women are less paid: 99{ecb01613692258d40e800a99e4d746e5d13d05ec98d2e9f5c1cfefb6e9fee158} of secretaries are women (and Monica Levensky was one of them) ,with average salary $ 13,000, preschool teachers 90{ecb01613692258d40e800a99e4d746e5d13d05ec98d2e9f5c1cfefb6e9fee158} females with average $14,000 food service workers 75{ecb01613692258d40e800a99e4d746e5d13d05ec98d2e9f5c1cfefb6e9fee158} females with average $ 8,200. These are considred to be respectable jobs for females but as compared to their salaries a street walker in Manhattan earns around $ 4000 ! Cathernis Mac Kinnon’s studies shows that, Modelling and Prostituion are the only professions in which women consistently earn more than males.
Of all the females jobs I listed above one women in four earns less than $ 10,000 a year though she works full time! In 1989, Miss America earned $ 1,50,000, $42,000 for scholarships and $ 30,000 car! Arlie Hoschschild found in her research that women are concentrated in jobs that stresses her physical attractiveness. In simple words : Women earn more from selling their bodies than their skills and talents!
One-third of women in the US military said they were sexually harassed, according to the latest Pentagon survey on the issue. According to the documents, 1,516 reports involved the Army; 565 for the Air Force; 394 for the Navy; and 213 for the Marines. The active duty Army, by far the largest service with about 518,000 soldiers, also saw the highest rate of reported sexual assaults.
( http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23636487/ns/us_news-military/t/pentagon-releases-sexual-harassment-data/)
This brings to my mind about the famous US reason for invading Afghanistan was to liberate their subjugated women! A decade ago the US First Lady Mrs. Bush’s went on the radio in the first solitary address of any president’s wife in U.S. history to dare all decent people of the world to join the US and its allies in freeing the women of Afghanistan from the“brutal terrorism” of Islamic fundamentalism. ( http://www.wsm.ie/c/women-liberation-afghanistan-war-bush)
And the amazing thing is that the largest complaint of sexual harassment comes from American women soldiers employed in Afghanistan to liberate Afghan women !
Author: Nisaar Nadiadwala, speaks and writes on socio-edicational issues from Islamic viewpoint. He can be reached at nisaar_yusuf@yahoo.com