A look at woman’s lot

Press, 24 July 1987, Page 15

A look at woman’s lot

Women are half the world’s people, they do nearly two-thirds of the world’s work, but earn only one-tenth of the world’s income.

Is women’s work a labour of love or a highly skilled managerial job? “A Woman’s World,” a six-part Adult Education series starting tonight at 8.30 on One, looks at the situation of women in different parts of the world.

The producer, Gillian McCredie, says the programme explores some of the ways in which women’s lives are changing both in the family and in the wider community. "It is a paradox that in all societies men are seen as the producers and the organisers of society, with women playing a reproductive and supportive role,” she says, “while the reality, taking the total of .he world’s work-hours — paid and unpaid — is that

women do nearly twothirds of all work. But, because universally this is unpaid or lowly paid, it is not valued.”

McCredie says not only is the contribution of women in agriculture, child-care and health-care unrecognised but, frequently, so is their status within the household. “A number of studies suggest that as many as one-third of all households in the world are headed by a woman. This means that in these households the main economic support is provided by women.” In many developing countries this results from the migration of men to the towns. In parts of Africa — Kenya, Botswana, Ghana, Sierra

Leone — more than 40 per cent of households have women as the head. This trend is not confined to developing countries. Britain’s 1981 census shows 25 per cent of all households in England and Wales have a woman head of household. “So the work of women is central to the community and perhaps we need to rethink drastically our ideas about how society is organised,” says McCredie. “But it remains a fact that women are seriously disadvantaged in relation to ownership of land, income, access to education and training. It seems clear that what is needed are policies in both developing and developed countries which recognise fully the contributions that women make and the constraints under which they live and work.”