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Gender inequality in Nigeria Printable Version PRINTABLE VERSION
by FRANKLIN, Nigeria May 31, 2007
Education , Sexuality   Opinions

  

South-East Asia

Somewhat less rigid gender relations are found in the way kinship and family are organised in South-East Asia (Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam) and, to some extent, the southern states of India and Sri Lanka. The structure of households is still along corporate lines, but with important differences. For example, a child is considered equally related to both its parents and a person’s most important social grouping comprises relatives from both sides. Son preference is moderate or non-existent.

There are more cases of women as well as men being able to inherit property, and a greater incidence of matrilineal kinship, where property and descent are traced through women. While income is likely to be pooled in these households, women are often responsible for managing the household budget. A greater number of newly married couples set up their own households and more wives retain links with their natal families. The exchange of wealth at marriage tends to be reciprocal between the families of bride and groom, or else greater on the part of the latter in the form of ‘bride-wealth’. Most South-East Asian countries have traditionally been more tolerant of sexual freedom for both women and men, although colonialism brought in more restrictions, particularly for women.

Boserup noted that female family labour made up around 50 per cent of the total agricultural force in Thailand and 75 per cent in Cambodia, both areas of female farming. Women also made up around half of the labour force engaged in trade and commerce in Burma, Cambodia, Lao PDR, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam (see box 3.3).
Box 3.3 Gender Relations in Vietnam

Despite the strong influence of Confucianism among the ruling elite in pre-revolutionary Vietnam, most rural women worked daily in the fields and were largely responsible for trade. Vietnamese women were not only involved in managing the household budget, but also in direct production such as transplanting rice and, importantly, in marketing the produce. Husbands could not dispose of harvested rice without their wives’ consent. Although there was patrilocal-patrilineal marriage and some evidence of son preference, women were not regarded as ‘helpers to men’ but as their equals.

However, the absence of any marked restrictions on women’s mobility, and some degree of symmetry in the division of labour in the household, should not be taken to imply an absence of gender inequality in general in these societies. For example, even though Filipino women may have high status relative to women in some other countries, this needs to be assessed in relation to Filipino men to be meaningful. It should also be noted that it is in the relatively more egalitarian regimes of South-East Asia – Thailand and the Philippines – that sex tourism has emerged as a key source of income for women. Clearly, labour markets continue to reproduce gender disadvantage. Bearing this in mind, it is still clear that gender regimes in this part of the world do not result in the very marked gender inequalities in survival and well-being which, as shown in the next chapter, continue to characterise regions marked by ‘extreme’ patriarchy.
Sub-Saharan Africa

Research on household arrangements in sub-Saharan Africa point to the wide prevalence of highly complex, lineage-based homesteads with considerable gender segmentation. Women and men from the same homestead may work in separate groups, in different economic crops or on separate fields, and spouses may maintain individual accounting units. This presents a different challenge to mainstream economic portrayals

of the household (as a unified entity whose members pool and share their resources in order to maximise their joint welfare) to that posed elsewhere. Where households are organised on a corporate basis, as described earlier, the challenge has consisted of noting the existence of gender and other inequalities in the distribution of household welfare. There, certain members are systematically discriminated against in the distribution of the gains to household production. Here, however, household goods and incomes are generally not even meant to be held in common. Instead, cultural ideas and practices require that male and female income and resources belong to different spheres and are intended for different uses. Hence the need for a complex set of transactions in the household through which labour and incomes are used and needs met.

Along with [some] similarities there are important differences in the social organisation of kinship and gender relations across the African sub-continent, and even in the same country.

Much of sub-Saharan Africa is patrilineal. Women’s access to land is usually through usufructuary rights (i.e. rights to farm the land and profit from the produce but not to ownership) through their husband’s lineage group. Since women’s obligations to the family include food provisioning and caring for their children, they are granted this access to enable them to carry out these responsibilities. Female seclusion is uncommon, although it does occur among some communities such as the Muslim Hausa in Nigeria. However, such seclusion occurs in segmented households and Hausa women retain considerable economic autonomy. They manage their own enterprises and engage in ‘internal market’ transactions with their husbands. Marriage in the region usually involves the contractual payment of bride-wealth to the lineage of the woman by the husband’s family.







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women participation in politics
lawal shehu | Oct 8th, 2010
women needs to be involved in political administration of their respective constituencies where information about their problems will be heard and addressed by the appropriate institution not necessarily the government but the voluntary institutions who cares about women.



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