Women in the Local Economy in Post-war Sri Lanka

By Centre for Poverty Analysis

On 04 May 2014

“…when we look at the challenges for women in the local economy, and the adequacy of response, we need to look at women across the country.  Let’s start by looking at what we mean when we say women in the local economy.  Women, economy are all loaded words, and how we perceive the challenges and adequacies of response to women in the local economy, will really depend on how we understand these terms. Understanding the role that women play in the local economy and the challenges they face, is very much linked to the role that women play in society – and the way in which their roles are perceived and valued.  Patriarchy, tradition, culture, social norms, religion, even the Mahinda Chinthana – all define the way  women are perceived in society, and this has an impact on the way women participate in the local economy.

…

I think what I have tried to highlight, with examples from the research of my organization and others, is that patriarchal orientation of society and the formal institutions, and the unshared burden of the care economy, push poor women, in both formal and informal sectors of the economy, to the lower levels.  If you are a woman in the North, this situation is probably worse!  It is not possible for the institutions of the state to respond adequately to pulling people up from  this level, because the state institutions themselves are caught up in the same sort of thinking (e.g. that fisheries is about what the men do). Patriarchy permeates some of the representative organizations (e.g. the plantation trade unions, which are dominated by men, even though a significant proportion of  membership is female).  Women have begun to distance themselves from the garment sector, for example, but there are no signs of their being positive institutional responses to that. So basically, the responses are inadequate – and will probably continue to be so, unless we are able to tackle the problem of patriarchy.”

Text from a talk given by Priyanthi Fernando at the Soroptimist International 40th Anniversary celebrations. Read the rest of this article here.