Amanda Gouws responded in today’s Cape Times to my blog post of August 29, which later appeared in the Cape Times under the regrettably misleading heading “Gender parity is not the ideal”. Prof. Gouws is right on many fronts: I have not read the literature on formal versus substantive gender equality, and know little about the different definitions of gender justice. I also had not read the open letter published by the Women’s Forum and, in truth, did not even know that a Stellenbosch University Women’s Forum existed or that it was them who had published the poster in the lift.
Instead, I arrived at work one morning, got into the lift and, as one does, scanned through the wall posters. One of them, the infographic on gender inequality, was fascinating. I got out of the lift and later that week, I wrote a post on this blog about my thoughts on the difference between a strict 50% gender quota and gender equality, which I defined as the opportunity to be promoted and to earn the same regardless of your gender. I said that where discrimination still persists, it is wrong. I said that I suspect we are moving in the right direction; that if you had to draw a similar infographic a decade ago, it would look remarkably different. And I made suggestions that could speed up the process by, for example, making parental leave for men compulsory and equal to that of women.
Somehow, though, prof. Gouws has missed that I agree with her on nearly every point she raises in her response today. Instead, she chooses to build her own straw man, one that vaguely sounds like he might have said the things she protests against, and shoots him down. She misquotes me several times. To give one example, she writes: “Fourie thinks it is ‘normal’ to have fewer women professors”. I don’t think that and didn’t say that. Control-F my blog post or the Cape Times piece and see if you can find the word ‘normal’ in it, which she attributes to me by placing it in direct quotes. I also did not say “in time it will change”, although, according to prof. Gouws’s own statistics, it has. She notes that in her twelve years in the Senate, the number of female professors has increased from 6 to 60, an annual growth rate of 21%. If the trend continues, we could see gender parity at senate level within the next decade, not 40 years as prof. Gouws suggests. Now that is worth celebrating, right? Wrong, according to prof. Gouws. It is simply my “sexism hiding behind arguments about numbers”.
A week or so after I wrote the original post, I was contacted by Stellenbosch University’s marketing office to know whether they could send the piece to the media. My blog is public, so I don’t mind if the posts are reposted elsewhere, and so I agreed. A month later, September 30, the piece was published in the Cape Times under the title “Gender parity is not the ideal”. I would have chosen a different title, but newspapers need an audience, and catchy titles like that sell. So I understand why they did it. But I certainly did not find it “necessary to take the issue into the media without consulting the Women’s Forum”, as prof. Gouws claims.
The Women’s Forum, according to prof. Gouws, “wanted to start a debate about gender equality at Stellenbosch University. This was an opportunity for our male colleagues to show solidarity with women.” I would suggest prof. Gouws got exactly what she wanted.
