editorial

A necessary evil

Another women’s day has come and gone.

Women themselves have mixed feelings about marking this event. Some believe it is demeaning and patronising to allot one day each year to the valuable contribution women make to society and the problems they face on both the professional and domestic front. It smacks of lip service at its worst, they complain.

But many will also admit that while so much still needs to be done to help women in their uphill battle to achieve equality, women’s day is a necessary evil. The hurdles working women encounter, which range from cultural pressures to a lack of childcare facilities, are considerable. And if an annual ‘day’ is the only way to force the issue, as it were, then so be it.
Interestingly, a number of women interviewed this year called for tangible improvements to be made in our childcare facilities.

Many said that these facilities needed to be more professional and accountable, on a par with our kindergarten set-ups.

These are pragmatic steps we need to take and the length of time it inevitably takes for them to come to fruition is frustrating. But that fades into significance when placed next to the challenge of trying to change the mentality of a nation, as the president of the National Council of Women, Catherine Attard, said in this paper last week.

Changing the mentality of employers has proved to be one of the most daunting challenges. Unfortunately, many view women as employees who are likely to disrupt their worklife with domestic commitments, rather than taking on board the valuable contribution they make in the workplace and helping them to keep that going.

But even more demoralising, as Catherine pointed out, sometimes women only have themselves to blame for their plight. They might be the victims of our paternalistic culture, but they are often also their own worst enemies. When it comes down to the division of labour, many women, including independent and intelligent ones, still tend to regard financial matters in the home and suchlike as the male domain. There are women with degrees or who hold decision-making professional posts who still can’t fill in a tax form. If women don’t take themselves seriously, how on earth can they expect anyone else to?

The paternalistic culture is undoubtedly still very much entrenched in our society, but unless women stop dancing to the tune that men are playing, change will remain a long way off. And until that change is evident, women’s day, dubious occasion that it is, will have to remain with us.

Matters of the heart

The figures that heart surgeon Alex Manché quoted when interviewed by our paper today make disconcerting reading. And he has no qualms in citing smoking as one of the prime contributory factors that leads to most of his patients finding themselves on his operating table.

Mr Manché’s typical patients are sixty-something men who are now paying the price for 30 or so years of smoking. But as he points out, women have now caught up with the men in the smoking habit, so more females will also find themselves going under the surgeon’s knife.

And perhaps even more worrying are the indications that our younger generations are smoking, eating junk food and not exercising, regardless of the warnings.

Are we doing enough to encourage them towards a healthy lifestyle? Mr Manché and his team performed a staggering 400 heart and 100 lung operations in 2001, many of which were smoking-induced or related.

And before we switch off from yet more statistics, let’s remember that while these individuals might be paying the price for years of smoking, we all foot the hospital bill.