By
Lora J. Mackel
We, my friends, live in the 21st century. The age of high technology and education- an enlightened age.
But if we live in such an enlightened age, how can so many of the age-old problems humanity has always struggled with still exist? Racism still seethes, the poor are still poor while the rich are still rich. And though men and women are afforded the same protection under the law, the power relationship between them is still unequal.
Men still hold an overwhelming majority of the traditional seats of authority in our society. Education and technology have done very little to address the discrepancies. Women only constitute 13 percent of the national legislative spots, while they comprise 51 percent of the population.
Shall we then turn to more drastic measures? As we have done so many times in the past, shall we turn our eyes to the "continent" for ideas about how to fix the very universal problem of gender inequality? After all, Europeans do have quite the reputation for being progressive. The French struggle with fixing the gender gap in their society. Recently, rather than waiting around for huge shifts in cultural attitudes, these impatient Europeans have legislated the problem away. Incensed that women only accounted for 9 percent of the legislative population, the French searched for solutions. They arrived at quotas.
But a quota does not make a social shift. Women in France are now being hounded to join political parties as candidates more than ever, but women who are willing are very hard to find. Though the society is supposedly equal, many French women still do not feel welcome in the political forum.
Only now, parties are seeking them in great numbers, without much sincerity for the input they provide, but merely to say that they have a female among them. Women in our country have been free to vote and run for political office for over 80 years, and minorities in America have been fully free to participate since the mid-1960s. Despite these revolutionary changes, the faces of our politicians have remained consistently white and male. Frustration at the situation is entirely justified, and the idea of laws legislating equality has entered the fantasy world of many enlightened people.
But equality by legislation alone will always fail.
To arrive at a satisfactory power balance among citizens requires something infinitely more difficult - changing our culture. This change can be brought about by education, by parenting and by the vigilant attention that every citizen lavished on justice.
Without real changes in the culture, legislation like that of France shows itself to be as flat and hollow as it really is. It should really alarm us that women, many of whom grew up after the women's movement, still do not think themselves capable of leading. Women in the West are now more educated than ever and have proved to be the intellectual equals of their male counterparts. How then can they still be lagging behind in real equality? Sadly, quotas are still needed to spark societal changes.
Americans, like the French, are interested in equality. But changing a society's way of thinking of itself takes time, and so quotas at best are a needed, but temporary fix.
What really needs to be communicated to human beings at birth is their inherent equality with one another. Somehow, even in our enlightened culture, women still get the message that they are not qualified to lead, and therefore they do not. Only when they are given the message by our culture that they are capable of leading will they hold power positions in a percentage proportionate to their population.
Clearly, there is a long way to go.
