Sexism, opportunity and South Africa

On Friday I read about an Ipsos poll that found that sexist ideas were still pretty much dominant in South Africa.

This was after reading the following on a post from The Conversation:

“Both white and black women’s rights activists need to realise that, for black women, demands for equal dignity and fairness do not necessarily entail a desire to do away with male leadership in the home, community and country.”

This does not make logical sense to me.

Equality and fairness are impossible in a situation in which leadership is exclusively assigned to one gender, because such an assignation is neither equal nor fair.

But it scratched something at the back of my mind as I thought about it, something that crystallised later in the day as I read:

“Both genders believe women should be kept “in their place” and‚ when jobs are scarce‚ men have more rights to a job than women‚ according to the survey released on Friday.”

I despise this whole idea of people being kept “in their place” -  the people who most use that sort of phrase tend to believe everybody else’s place is beneath them.

And they aren’t generally the sort to be nice to their subordinates. Showing me somebody who talks about putting people in their places, and I’ll show you somebody it would really suck to have as a boss.

But aside from that, there it was again, that scratching at the back of my brain quite aside from the horrific injustice that is being perpetuated by this sort of idea.

Nobody was focusing on the idea that in the end, there are jobs that need doing.

In the end if I hire somebody to do something, what I care about is that the thing gets done.

A job is not a right or a privilege, it is not a nice thing to give somebody, it is something you are paid to do because the person paying you for one reason or another either couldn't or didn’t want to do it themselves.

And that concept is somehow missing from our discourse. Equality in education and economic opportunity is not a matter of playing favourites, it is a matter of getting things done.

Those girls who are getting a worse education than the boys? In an alternate universe they’re coming up with cures to AIDS, or building rockets to Jupiter, or saving entire species from extinction.

Our abilities as human beings are individual and unique. You cannot replace one human with another and get the same results.

So when we hit people in terms of opportunity, we end up limiting the excellence of our results, because our boys and girls are individuals whose potentials are all individual.

Our girls are part of the set of human resources our country has to dig itself out of the hole it has been buried in by colonialism, Apartheid and misrule by miscreants.

There is stuff we need to get done, and there are children growing up who could do it – if we give them the tools to do it.

We have no means of telling which child will do what, only that there is a lot to do.

Leadership is just like work, it is about getting things done and when we limit ourselves to one gender, or one population group we end up with sup-optimal leadership.

It is not a matter of one man winning because a woman lost, if the woman could do the job better we all just lost.