Gender (in) equality

The rea­son I write this col­umn, and in­deed have done for many years now, is be­cause of the end­less stream of cul­tural com­par­isons that strike me on a reg­u­lar basis hav­ing set­tled in a place so dif­fer­ent from where I was born. And those com­par­isons are not only with my own na­tive cul­ture, that of the UK, but with other cul­tures I lived and worked in dur­ing my younger years, namely Ger­many, the US, Aus­tralia and Japan. Like many peo­ple, I have also trav­elled widely in my life­time, and I think you’ll agree that cul­tural com­par­isons be­come sec­ond na­ture when set­ting foot in a for­eign land for the first time. Added to that, liv­ing in a me­trop­o­lis like Barcelona, I come into con­tact with for­eign cul­tures on a daily basis, be it Chi­nese, Mo­roc­can, Ar­gen­tin­ian, Bo­li­vian, Brazil­ian, and so on, and we can also draw con­clu­sions from those ex­pe­ri­ences, even if over-gen­er­al­i­sa­tion is both un­fair and un­war­ranted.

I’ve wanted to write about the sub­ject of this month’s col­umn – gen­der (in)equal­ity – for some time, but some­thing has al­ways held me back. I’m not sure what. But a cou­ple of oc­cur­rences in Cat­alo­nia in the past month, which there­fore re­ceive a men­tion in this mag­a­zine, have prompted me to do so here, even if it will be only a very su­per­fi­cial treat­ment of the sub­ject given space con­sid­er­a­tions.

The two oc­cur­rences in ques­tion are the new Cata­lan pres­i­dent ap­point­ing a ma­jor­ity of women to his cab­i­net, and Barça women’s foot­ball team being crowned the best team in Eu­rope.

Pol­i­tics and foot­ball, two spheres where male dom­i­nance has been the norm for so long. I’m not going to go fur­ther into that here, but rather just note that it is those news items that have brought me to fi­nally write about the issue.

So here’s my point, which I con­fess may not be pop­u­lar, or even seen as ac­cu­rate by many who live here: in my ex­pe­ri­ence, Cata­lan women are far from the sec­ond-class cit­i­zens of other cul­tures I have en­coun­tered. I have ac­tu­ally al­ways seen them as strong fig­ures when com­pared to women from some of those other cul­tures.

I lived in Japan a long time ago, but noth­ing I have wit­nessed since leav­ing that coun­try has led me to be­lieve that Japan­ese women are much more em­pow­ered than they were back then. I was com­pletely shocked at the fe­male sub­servience in Japan­ese so­cial cus­toms from the day I first ar­rived in that coun­try. I have also been in sit­u­a­tions where I have been de­ferred to as the man in the group, on this oc­ca­sion, when in the com­pany of a group of Colom­bian women who were friends with my late wife. It was a sit­u­a­tion that I found quite dis­turb­ing, if I’m com­pletely hon­est. We have all heard of other ex­am­ples, of cul­tures where the women are sup­posed to walk be­hind the men, and count­less other so­cial cus­toms that ap­pear to have what is known in acad­e­mia as hege­monic mas­culin­ity at their ori­gin.

Whether or not you agree with my briefly posited opin­ion that women here are more em­pow­ered than those in other cul­tures, I would like to state for the record that I am both happy and proud to live in a cul­ture where the ta­bles ap­pear to be fi­nally turn­ing in more vis­i­ble so­cial spheres when it comes to equal­ity. Bravo, Senyor Aragonès, and bravo Barça women.