InternationalA month of flowers
Published: Saturday March 03, 2007 in Living in Armenia
There will be more flower vendors on March 8, International Women’s Day. Armen Hakobyan / Armenian Reporter.
A month of festivities and observances await women in Armenia. It all begins with International Women's Day on March 8 and culminates on April 7, Mother's Day. There will be the standard-issue round tables organized by nongovernmental and international organizations, conferences, art exhibitions, concerts, meetings, discussions, and debates. These events will attempt to raise public awareness, to address serious concerns about the lack of women's involvement in the political, economic, and social life of the country, to tackle the thorny reality of women's reproductive health, discrimination in the labor market, lack of access to productive resources, absence of women in the private sector and the list goes on. All of these events, however, will pale in comparison to the most important custom of the day - the passing out of flowers. This time-honored tradition is one that some women hang on to unabashedly. Any comment or suggestion that receiving flowers on International Women's Day, when women are absent from all or most decision making in the country is rather hypocritical comes at a great cost to she who dares question the mystique behind this flower-giving and flower-receiving practice. In the end, the real beneficiaries of this ritual are the flower vendors who set up shop on almost every street corner of the city during the heady days of celebration.
Being a woman in Armenia is tricky business. Being a diasporan Armenian woman can leave you scratching your head in disbelief.
Don't get me wrong. I like receiving flowers as much as anyone else and it doesn't grate my sensibilities when I receive flowers as a gesture of love, gratitude, friendship, or whatever. But the whole spirit of International Women's Day seems to get lost amidst the blooms. The country faces serious problems when it comes to gender issues. The culprit is not the constitution or the laws or the international agreements that the Armenian government has signed. In fact, under the law in all instances women are granted equal status to men. Women are not barred from education, are not required to wear burkas, nor are they paid less than men in the public sector. On the contrary, 60 percent of all those who hold graduate degrees are women, rates of women's enrollment in undergraduate studies are higher than men, and one just needs to stroll about the campus at Yerevan State University to see that freedom of dress is expressed much more freely than in most "developed" nations. There seems to be a something askew in the country's value system.
In a recent report on measures to improve the situation of women in the South Caucasus, the Committee for Equal Opportunities for Men and Women of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe found that Armenia comes in last, after Azerbaijan and Georgia, when it comes to the representation of women in parliament: the rates were 4.6 percent in Armenia (6 out of 131 members of the National Assembly) as opposed to 10.5 percent in Azerbaijan and 9.4 percent in Georgia. There is only one woman cabinet minister and a handful of women deputy ministers.
This same report also stated that there is a prevalence of violence against women, discussion of which, according to the report, is "still largely taboo." Currently there are no state statistics on domestic violence owing largely to the fact that in a majority of cases, the violence is not reported. Society does not yet want to come to terms with violence against women for an array of reasons stemming largely from cultural traditions, pride, and the sanctity of the family. I have trouble understanding this mentality, for if there is violence in the home, then what or whose sanctity are we protecting?
Unlike domestic violence, which at least is acknowledged to exist, widespread sexual discrimination is a nonissue. Abortion continues to be a measure of regulating fertility; one just needs to talk to any gynecologist to understand the severity of the situation. Many women are having multiple abortions during their childbearing years. A recent report by the World Bank regarding the reproductive health of women found that 55 percent of all pregnancies are artificially terminated.
Perhaps one of the most critical issues facing women in Armenia is poverty. The same World Bank report finds that 53 percent of all the poor in Armenia are women, 66 percent of the unemployed are women - the highest percentage of female unemployment in the Caucusus. While both men and women in Armenia are at risk of poverty, the risk factor for women-led households is much greater. Today 30 percent of all Armenian households are women led, an exceptionally vulnerable segment of society, at risk of finding themselves in extreme poverty by 33%.
Women and business? Prepare to be astonished. Of all businesses, 0.3 percent are owned by women. Perhaps this is not so surprising, considering women did not benefit from privatization, and persisting rigid gender roles continue to dictate what productive resources men and women have access to.
As a woman who up until 6 years ago lived in North America, I never thought much about issues of equal rights, poverty, discrimination, or domestic violence. It was always somebody else's problem. Generations of women before me had laid the groundwork for the women's movement which placed these issues on the public agenda, and although they weren't always successful, they undeniably aided in the advancement of women in all areas of life.
As an Armenian living in North America I never thought much about these issues either because I existed in the insularity of community life which was concerned with prolonging Armenian language and culture and raising funds to build centers, churches, and schools.
However in Armenia if we do not have a serious and comprehensive public discourse by both men and women about the persisting gender imbalance, it will invariably have a negative impact on society in the long run. When half of society's potential is not utilized, when women do not have a voice in the country's decision-making bodies, when women do not have a role in public-development policies and in the development of economic strategies, then to expect a reduction in poverty, improvement in good governance, sustainable growth, or an increase in productivity is akin to settling for spring flowers to be delivered on International Women's Day.
