Three years ago, after President Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine signed his July edict entitled “On Measures to Improve the Performance of Central and Local Authorities in Ensuring Equal Rights and Opportunities for Men and Women in Ukrainian Society,” the Verkhovna Rada finally managed to pass this important legislation. It had been lobbied by civic organizations for almost a decade, and in 2005 eight different versions of the bill were submitted to parliament.
Experts say that between 1999 and 2005 Ukrainian MPs refused to comprehend the gender issue because they were relying on a system of values that had been hammered into their heads under the Soviets. Even in today’s still very traditional Ukrainian society debates are still swirling around the clauses of the equal rights law and situations that are linked to the implementation of its individual clauses.
Such discussions are also taking place in daily life. Ukrainians are questioning whether male and female equality is necessary. It turns out that it is, and with every passing year it is increasingly needed by men or rather – by both men and women.
GENDER PROBLEM: NOT A QUESTION OF ETIQUETTE BUT WOMEN’S POTENTIAL
Ukraine is still a country where power is in the hands of men, who are loath to share it with women (I do not mean anyone in the upper echelons of power today). According to the sociological survey “Gender Stereotypes and Public Attitudes to Gender Problems in Ukrainian Society,” which was conducted by the Center for Social Expertise of the Institute of Sociology at Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences (NAN), 50 percent of Ukrainians believe there is gender inequality in our society, with 62 percent emphasizing that women’s rights are being violated.
Experts say that the Ukrainian public has quite an objective view of the situation. The level of familiarity with this problem is slowly increasing. Today, most violations of women’s rights relate to the economic sphere and domestic life. According to the State Committee of Statistics (Derzhkomstat), Ukrainian women’s salaries are 73 percent of men’s. According to the results of sociological surveys, 75 percent of all Ukrainian women have encountered physical, economic, sexual, or psychological violence within the family.
As for the number of women in Ukrainian politics or business, 13 percent of parliamentarians in the Verkhovna Rada are women (8 percent in 2001), 10 percent cabinet ministers are women (there were none in 2001), and there is almost full gender equality in large and small village councils, as was the case seven years ago. Women are not being permitted entry into high politics or business, or women themselves are not willing to take the risk. For example, 12 percent of big businesses in Ukraine are headed by women, who comprise 38 percent of all entrepreneurs.
Since there is a slow but steady increase in women’s activism in society, the question is: What positive things for the state can come from women who are involved in making important decisions and implementing their initiatives?
Tamara Melnyk, an advisor to the Minister of Family, Youth, and Sports of Ukraine, explained: “Some will say, ‘What difference does it make if it’s a man or woman, as long as he or she is a professional?’ No, there is a difference. Women are more involved in the social sphere than men. This issue is a priority in Europe: this is the problem of eradicating poverty, problems of ecology and demography, the gender problem, and finally the problem of peace.”
Melnyk is convinced that if social problems are not resolved, there will be no progress in Ukrainian society. “Today it is difficult for Ukrainian politicians to acknowledge that these problems are priorities because these questions can be formulated this way only if there are many active women in the structure of power. A UN research institute says that if the proportion of women in Ukraine’s parliament is not 40 percent, then social problems are practically not being solved or are being resolved inadequately. If the proportion of women does not reach 20 percent, then problems relating to childhood are practically not being resolved. These statistics come from an analysis of the activities of parliaments throughout the world.
“Furthermore, the countries that occupy leading positions in terms of material wellbeing – Canada, Finland, New Zealand, Sweden, Iceland, and Norway – passed gender laws back in the 1970s and 1980s. They have reached this level because they enlisted human resources – men and women. But to this day we still consider gender a matter of etiquette. It is not etiquette. This is a problem that concerns the utilization of the female resource (he male resource is fully engaged), and a problem concerning the development of society as a whole.”
Experts are convinced that gender equality is one of the priorities of democratic progress in any country and a prerequisite for improving the situation in the humanitarian and social spheres. In their opinion, the Ukrainian law, which is still being debated and some of its clauses have yet to be formulated and expanded, “provides the possibility not to ignore gender problems in society.” For example, when demographic, family, or national defense policies (the number of women in the army is increasing) are being drafted, the gender aspect is now being taken into account (the responsibility of experts at Ukraine’s Ministry of Justice).
“The need to improve our legislation means that we must react to changes that are knocking on our doors. We believe that we must update our laws on parties and civic organizations. The process of drafting budgets also requires changes in order to take into account the needs of women and men, just like in Europe,” said Larysa Kobylianska, the coordinator of the Equal Opportunities Programmes in Ukraine, part of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
THE GENDER PROBLEM AFFECTS MEN TOO
Experts say that if our politicians are ignoring the social sphere and deriding women’s activism, they won’t be laughing 10 to 15 years from now.
“To a certain degree, our men are suicidal. They aren’t even capable of analyzing the current situation in Ukraine or the looming consequences of our negligent attitude to social problems. If we want to have a normal society in Ukraine, we must start with the family. Today, 40 percent of men in Ukraine cannot have children. They are dying within the most productive age bracket of 30-50 years. Male politicians don’t see these problems. We have to engage masses of people in the social sphere today, and the majority of them must be women,” Melnyk emphasized.
The problem of male mortality is being studied only by a small number of experts, but within a decade or so this problem will affect the whole society, because even now adult males make up only 38 percent of the population.
“The mortality rate for men between the ages of 28 and 42 is four times higher than that of females; every fourth 16-year-old boy stands the risk of dying before the retirement age. Failing to see these problems is like closing the prospects for our society for many years to come. If this situation continues, we will find ourselves facing problems we have never faced before. Fifteen years from now we will have a depleted, female-dominated, society in Ukraine, a birth-rate crisis, and a huge manpower problem. Our society and government must start thinking about these problems; we cannot ignore these trends,” Kobylianska said.
Experts say the media are among those who are responsible for this situation because they are forming the wrong image of contemporary men and women. The media say that an “ideal man” is one that has things that most Ukrainians do not possess: a Mercedes, a business, a three-story country house, and the constant desire to achieve.
“For the sake of fairness, it should be said that discrimination exists not just against women but also against men. Whereas our society is already prepared to see discrimination against women, this is not so where men are concerned. But this kind of discrimination is very dangerous because our media are creating the kind of man that simply doesn’t exist in real life. In other words, there are excessively high expectations of men, but because these expectations don’t correspond to the norm, this may lead to destructive behaviors: alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicide,” explained Ukraine’s UNDP coordinator.
The same is true of the “ideal woman.” For a long time Western psychologists have been warning that the standards of female beauty that are propagated in the media cause depression and trigger inferiority complexes in young women. No such studies have been carried out in Ukraine, but our experts say that the image of young Ukrainian men and women corresponds by 90 percent to the one promoted in TV ads.
SEX IN THE MEDIA
The Ukrainian media, particularly television, occupies a significant place in the lives of ordinary people, and most children, unfortunately. Considering that commercials are broadcast every 20 to 30 minutes on television (not to mention ads in the subway system and billboards on streets), this may be described as expansion, one that is marked by bad taste and the manipulation of people’s fixed patterns of response to stimuli. All this relates very much both to the male and female genders.
“If we consider the amount of sexism in commercials, magazines, and posters and compare it to the scope of domestic violence, we will see a direct correlation. Violence against women, children, and elderly people who live with young families is also widespread in Ukraine,” said Ella Lamakh, director of the Family and Gender Policy Department at the Ministry of Family, Youth and Sports of Ukraine.
“Look at our TV Channel M1, where the weather forecast is presented against the background of a nude woman; all those commercials for bank loans that show girls clad in skimpy nurses’ uniforms; girls wearing mini-skirts in subways ads about Kyiv’s satellite cities; and all those evening programs on various channels. The emphasis on a woman’s body gives the signal that a woman means sexual services. There is a lot of this in our media. This has become a mass phenomenon. Increasing the amount of this ‘information’ boosts domestic violence (men feel they are the masters of women), the divorce rate, and the numbers of unsupervised children. In fact, this kind of advertising is proof of the caliber of advertising agencies and the way they see the intellectual level of the potential consumers of their ads.”
Lamakh cited one case. The residents of Vinnytsia oblast forced the local authorities to put an end to this type of psychological abuse by making them remove from the trolley buses serving the regional center ads promoting a local newspaper, which showed a man beating up his wife for writing something on the margins of his newspaper. This is one of a handful of cases where a local community succeeded in defeating aggressive advertising. But this is the exception rather than the rule.
The situation is completely different in Europe, where, experts say, lawsuits against advertising agencies who produce immoral commercials and ads have become widespread. Clearly, we have yet to adopt such a practice. At the moment this is the responsibility of the Family and Gender Policy Department at the Ministry of Family, Youth and Sports.
We must finally realize that gender problems do not concern only women’s desire to realize themselves. Rather, it is the desire of the entire society to live in a developed country with a functioning civil society. As we can see, the gender issue starts with an image depicted on a leaflet stuck on the wall of a subway car and ends with the policies of the president of Ukraine, in whose seat 18 percent of Ukrainians would like to see a woman.
Although the implementation of Ukraine’s equal rights law is being delayed, everyone knows what the gender issue is, thanks to the efforts of civic organizations, special consultants at the youth and family ministry, and the heads of regional and district state administrations.
Eight years ago Ukraine signed the UN Millennium Declaration and undertook to honor all its social commitments, including gender equality. This means that the wage gap between men and women must be reduced twofold, and the proportion of women in the Verkhovna Rada and the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine must reach 30 percent. Trends indicating the feminization of society are already present, so this process must not be damaged by bad advertising.
