If you want a good laugh, look at the World Economic Report’s recent report on the level of gender equity in Kazakhstan. [Look!] Our beloved Respublika leapt to 41st place (out of 134), beating France, Russia, and Italy. So what makes this obscure conservative patch of steppe a better place to be a woman than the three most cleavage-friendly countries in the world? Work!
Kazakhstani women have it great. On a scale of zero to 1, 1 being “Equality” and zero being “Yemen”, women here rank a 2.02 (Double Equality!) in the category “Professional and Technical Workers”. They rank a 1.5 (One-and-a-Half Equality!) in the category “Enrollment in Tertiary Education”, and make up the vast majority of educators.
Wohoo!! Things are so equal here that women study more, work more, and educate more than men! And according to a recent unofficial survey conducted by me, women have reached levels of Triple Equality in the categories “Washing Dishes” and “Sweeping the Rocks in the Street in front of One’s House”.
Good job, World Economic Report. I’d just point out, if I could, that in basing your judgments completely on statistics you have managed to confuse “Equality” with “Slavery”. Just a minor thing.
Maybe les francaises get paid less every month than les francais, but I can’t imagine any of them would trade their form of inequality for, say, arranged marriage at 17. Has the ivory tower gotten so high that economists can’t see through the fog of their statistics to the human level? They report a cheery 75% in the category “Existence of legislation punishing acts of violence against women”, but ask me, what happened when my 18-year-old pregnant student showed up to class one day with burns on her neck and fingernail-shaped chunks torn out of her arm? Fucking nothing. Laws have to be implemented to mean something, geniuses. Doesn’t Massachusetts have a law against oral sex still on the books? We’re not exactly getting accolades from Christine O’Donnell.
I’ve been holding Gender Discussion seminars (better title pending) in which I always hear that a good Kazakhstani woman is shy, obedient, hardworking, and respectful. Nothing shocking, just traditional. But the traditional roles of the superior man and the inferior woman are being broken down, slowly, by a quiet erosion of respect for men.
This report I keep roasting is idiotic to place Kazakhstan 41st in terms of gender parity, but its statistics do bely coming social change. When women start surpassing men in the realms of education, health, and productive employment (as well as doing all the work at home), they begin to supplant the man in his seat of superiority. Sometimes revolutions don’t need conscious actors.
Right now, most women here defer to their man in every decision. My host mom once asked her husband for permission to attend her own grandfather’s funeral (and if he said no?). But this isn’t sustainable. Most men here, well, they suck. Drunkenness in men is barely shameful, it’s so widespread. Walk around at lunch hour and you’ll see all sorts of unemployed cheloveks playing cards (the only card game here is appropriately named “idiot”) and spitting sunflower seeds like they’re too cool for school. Meanwhile, their “Doubly Equal” female counterparts are wearing themselves out teaching those same mens’ rowdy, self-entitled sons.
This country’s future lies with the girls. It’s the girls who study, who achieve, who do all the productive things that will drive Kazakhstan out of the second world (that is, former Soviet bloc) and into the first. The boys, resting on their inherited laurels, make fools of their gender by being lazy and waiting for success to alight upon them like it did under Big Brother. Inevitably, women will acknowledge the ridiculousness of deferring to someone worse-educated and less-successfully-employed.
It’s not a social movement in any explicit way, but rather a natural progression coming, ironically, from women’s propensity to “be good”. Get a job, says her husband. Do the laundry, can the vegetables, watch the kids, cook the dinner. Don’t get a driver’s license, because I like to take the car out of a Sunday afternoon, park it on a side street, and take a nap in it (no joke, I see this all the time).
By being meek and taking on all the major responsibilities, women are bowing to the will of their husbands, but at the same time undermining their authority. These men are making themselves obsolete. Though it might seem backward, meek assumption of duties will slowly build this gender’s self-respect and sense of worth. Someday, they shall inherit the earth.
I would add the cautious disclaimer that every city in Kazakhstan is very unlike the other cities in Kazakhstan. With that said, I agree with your basic point wholeheartedly. In my experience here, women do 90% of the work that keeps society working smoothly here, as much as that term can apply. I can only hope that that will lead to them inheriting anything.
Facts for WEF to consider:
-When I tell little boys who hit little girls that boys should never hit girls, little boys laugh and say it’s the opposite! Little girls sadly agree.
-Like fat kids are known as the “fat kid” and men with big moles on their faces are known as the “man with a mole on his face”, women who drive cars are known as the “woman who drives.” That’s how rare it is.
-When dad hit mom on the head, every consoling word from both man and woman was “so?”
-Female teacher told me the first week I was in Kazakhstan “we have a wonderful tradition, it’s called… Askar, what’s it called? It’s when a man takes a woman off the street and says she must marry him.”
-Is “polygamy” (Kazakhstan’s score = polygamy doesn’t exist) really worse than “going to the prostitutes with your friends, the way Americans go to the movies with their friends” (Kazakhstan’s score = every man)?
You’re totally right that as the world changes, and as development goes up in Kazakhstan, a static situation will make the men look more and more foolish. Out of my top twenty students, the seventeen girls are going to make the other hundred boys look very stupid.