Select Committees and women’s rights

Women make up more than 50% of Sri Lanka’s population but they remain among the most marginalised with many issues of discrimination, inequality and gender-based violence left unaddressed. In an effort to provide a cohesive starting point to deal with these multi-pronged and complicated challenges women parliamentarians have banded together to set up Select Committee to look into gender-based discrimination and violation of women’s rights. 

While the effort is commendable it also indicates how difficult it is to get genuine policy-based change implemented by successive Sri Lankan governments. Given that women are estimated to make up about 52% of the population they are a significant part of any political party’s vote base. Yet, women political representation in Sri Lanka has been notoriously low for decades and even now is far below global standards. 

While parliamentary representation has stagnated at 5% or lower, it is even worse at lower levels of Government and while efforts have been made to address that by introducing a quota system, it has had mixed results. This does not in any way negate the importance of continuing the fight, however, but the widespread nature of systemic and structural discrimination and inequality makes this a daunting one. 

The MPs want the Committee to hear grievances of women on all sorts of gender-based discriminations including employment, promotional opportunities and harassments in work place. 

It also wants a review and advocates for the allocation of adequate domestic resources in all sectors and at all levels, and access to improve gender equity and equality in Sri Lanka; scrutinising and reviewing relevant laws, ensuring gender mainstreaming to prevent discrimination and negative impact on the lives of women and girls, and lobbying with relevant line Ministries and authorities to ensure gender responsive planning and budgeting.

The women MPs also want the Select Committee to look at lobbying and advocating for more women representation in decision-making bodies on national, provincial and local level, in public, civil society and in the private sector; reviewing measures for integration of gender equality principles at the national, provincial and local levels and encouraging public-private partnerships to improve gender equity and equality in Sri Lanka. 

Women’s issues often hit headlines when they are connected with violent crimes, as has been the case in recent days. But policy makers have been made aware of the need to economically and otherwise empower women for years. From an economic perspective female involvement in the formal workforce has been stagnant for more than a decade and despite all data pointing to the need for more women to be supported to change this, appeals for policy response has fallen on deaf years. The private sector is perhaps even guiltier of ignoring these issues than their public counterparts. 

The need for equal rights is often undermined by gender-blind patriarchy that strengthens conventional power structures in every sphere. Breaking these down is an extraordinarily difficult task and the parliamentary committee will at best only be a start. Once that process is completed it will be up to progressive women and men involved in different structures to find ways to implement change. This will be an inter-generational task that will be non-linear. Yet, all genuine change is incremental and strengthens a purpose worth fighting for.