Gender Roles Must Fall! – By Nomsa Lusanda Mbuli

A couple of weeks ago my colleagues had a discussion about lobola, and discussions like that automatically lead to a discussion about gender roles. The general assumption is that a man pays lobola for a woman and in return she spends the rest of her life catering to his needs. Well, that’s basically what it boils down to. She finds herself having to cook for him, wash his clothes, clean after him, iron his clothes and give him children while he rules the world. But that is just what happens in the privacy of our homes. The unfortunate thing is that these inequalities that are at home are reflected at higher national levels. These general practices that put women at the back, ‘in the kitchen’, are the very practices that leave women behind. Because of these traditional practices, we still rarely see women in senior positions. 

For Swaziland as a developing country, it is important that the economy capture the contribution of all its female citizens. By ignoring women in development, we will cut out half the country’s contribution. The general feeling is that women gravitate towards child rearing and things around the home, while men gravitate toward construction projects. This kind of thinking leads to the idea that women should remain at home and raise children because that’s what they are especially suited for, while men must enter the work force and earn money because that is what they are especially suited for. But that mentality is so 1800s! The most amazing thing is that some of the supporters of this mentality, as was one of my colleagues, are women who are actually at work. The fact that she is at work while saying this should be an indication that times have changed, and so should our thinking.

The other thing that people do not understand is that in this time and age, a lot of people actually no longer fit in the boxes that were created for them before they were even born. People just no longer fit in these supposedly ‘natural’ gender roles. I know a lot of women who feel more comfortable solving mathematical problems than they do holding a baby. There are many families where the man prefers cooking while the woman tends to the yard. Most, if not all, of the cooking shows I have watched such as Master Chef and The Cake Boss have proven this fact in that most of these top chefs are men. There are other families where you find that the woman is the one who goes to work, while the man stays at home, in most cases with no source of income of his own. 

The reality is that people are incredibly diverse, for every ‘natural’ woman there is a woman who finds the idea of having children foreign and frightening. For every man who loves fixing things there is a man who prefers taking his car to a shop or calling a plumber. I know too many people, both men and women, who do not fit into these ‘natural’ gender roles that it begins to make the idea of natural gender roles seem absurd and restrictive. The reality is that such mentality pushes people into specific boxes, whether they want to be there or not. The other reality is that it creates hypocrites out of us. To hear a woman who wakes up every morning and bands over backwards taking care of her family, speak so strongly in favour of gender roles or hearing an unemployed man tell a woman ‘she belongs in the kitchen’ is very problematic and hypocritical. And that, frankly, is why I have a problem with these gender roles and boxes that society is panel beating women into.