An award made by the Caribbean Court of Justice last month gave the entire region cause to wonder why, when we have a superior court of record – of a calibre far above many courts in the UK – we still opt to stick with the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in England for our court of final appeal. I really do not understand it.
There are some longstanding primitive and pre-colonial prejudices buried within our brains in this community.
I used to blame them on the rigid principles and protocols of the series of colonial rulers we have waded through, but when I began to study anthropology and came face-to-face with the deep-seated patriarchal attitudes of the inferiority of women, that predated the Spanish, Portuguese, French and British periods of rule based on gender bias and the resultant lack of opportunities for leadership allowed most women, I began to wonder why and how my mind had been conditioned to accept that as normal.
Thinking back to my own childhood, I started to remember that teachers were mostly female, except, occasionally, science teachers, but school principals or headmasters were always male.
As the decades passed, schools became divided by gender, with scarce resources (including science teachers ) going to boys’ schools.
More decades passed, I was teaching at UWI when I began to notice there were equal numbers of male and female graduates, and then the balance shifted. Suddenly, except in engineering and law, in the late 90s, more women were graduating, and women predominated in law as well.
Sitting next to one vice principal at a post-graduation dinner, I commented on this, and he looked at me cynically. "So you didn’t know?" he asked. "Until five years ago, just before this class of grads started at UWI, there was a formal policy admitting only women with marks ten per cent higher than the male average. This lot of women are just rising to their own level." His exact words. I stood in my shoes and wondered.
Before then, I was unaware that discrimination against women was a formal policy written into institutional systems. I honestly thought that racism was the only discriminatory evil.
As the decades passed, more women became heads of state and one little boy at Eton, during Margaret Thatcher’s time at the helm, when asked if he wanted to be prime minister when he grew up, scoffed in reply: "Don’t be crazy. Boys can’t be prime ministers!"
A statement that went viral.
Then, when Trevor MacDonald left TT for England to teach British media announcers how to speak English properly and got knighted for it, a survey on the new proliferation of women news announcers revealed two things: women tend to be more articulate and enunciate better, and networks can get them cheaper.
[caption id="attachment_1063930" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Former TSTT CEO Lisa Agard during a Unicef secondary schools programme at Queen's Park Oval, Port of Spain in May 2023. Agard was fired in the wake of a cyberattack at the state-owned company. - File photo by Jeff K Mayers[/caption]
