admin“I am glad, she only got 10 votes and she did not garner enough votes to proceed to the provincial elections,” one of them said.
This has become a common synopsis of underlying problems hindering women’s development and participation at both economic and political pedestals.
There is no doubt that the last decade has seen several women succeeding in fields that were traditionally dominated by men.
These include medicine, engineering, astronomy, and other hard hat-area-kind of jobs, which also focused on one’s physique more than anything else.
However, their achievements have been met with jealousy, anger and resentment and their colleagues will pull them down, given the slightest opportunity.
Whether it is in the family circles, church, work, the economic and political landscape, women have shown that they rarely guard each other’s back, but instead are always pulling daggers at each other to stop their counterparts from scaling dizzy heights.
The fight is even more vicious for women who have tried to court their colleagues’ support when running for public office. They will tell you that it has not been easy to get women to support them in their endeavour to achieve their dreams at whatever level.
Hundreds of women in political and economic circles, who wanted to be voted into political office, or be considered for a powerful corporate position recently, say they suffered serious-altering life-knocks at the hands of other women, instead of getting support.
They will give you horrendous tales of how they were decampaigned, bad-mouthed and called names by their female colleagues as they fought to get into power, competing with a man for the same position.
For others the fights became so vicious that they had to withdraw their candidature on realising that the sisterhood was not in support of their ascendancy to power, but were instead pushing for a man for that same position.
That problem is even heavily embedded in social systems, particularly within the family unit where women don’t get along with each other, yet there are informed by the same social norms and values. It is because of that socialisation, where society regards rivalry between daughters-in-law and mother-in-law as inherent generational issues and socially acceptable.
People say there is really nothing out of the ordinary to see a mother-in-law fight her daughter-in-law over trivialities, because that tiff is expected between the two and should not be taken seriously, at the same time, the very same women become more compliant and kind when dealing with men.
Sadly this abhorrent behaviour has manifested itself into a bigger problem than people ever thought. It has even affected women’s contribution on both the political
and economic front, where women will not vote for another woman, largely because they don’t think that she is as good as the next man she is competing with.
They become the barometers of other women’s capabilities, where they “buy in” into their own limiting beliefs.
They think that because they, themselves can’t, they don’t see how another woman will be able to do it, and that alone has become an institutionalised problem, that has contributed to the demise of women vying for public office.
These attitudes are heavily engraved in the minds of the very same women who advocate girl power, feminism, empowerment and female friendship.
One well-known celebrity, Sienna Miller had to admit that the fight among women was so vicious that they were always silently fighting each other.
“I’ve been at war, without a doubt. I have really experienced the judgment of women. There’s no sisterhood,” she recently opened up to the InStyle magazine.
Will it be wrong then to castigate men and other social circles when they say that women are their own worst enemies?
Quite a number of studies have been carried out across the globe, to establish why women don’t want to support each other, and most of the studies have shown that women are very insecure about themselves.
The studies say more often women, will consciously, or unconsciously sabotage other women because they don’t want to share attention. They like being different and see other women as competition — professionally or socially.
Jealousy, inferiority complex and the quest to do better than each other play a hand in women bickering and battling one another, such that they even fail to support each other on important matters like elevation in politics, economics at social clubs and in even in church. This is the reason why there are few women legislators and in other political structures, despite the fact that the majority of registered and active voters are women.
Statistics show that women actually voted the majority of current male legislators in Parliament into power, at the expense of their colleagues who were also vying for the same positions in those constituencies.
Instead of supporting each other, they saw it fit, to rally behind male candidates and in the process de-campaigning their colleague as unfit for office.
The trend is likely to continue until it dawns on women that they need to elevate each other into positions of power, to ensure that they are fairly represented across the board.
By continuing to disregard each other, they should know they are further reinforcing existing gender stereotypes that have often regarded women as weak, indecisive, petty and rarely make good leaders.
Of course, that is not true, because emerging trends have shown that women are actually good leaders, who given the necessary support can bring dynamic
changes to any organisation.
Women need to acknowledge that they are a group, within the same culture, dealing with the same stereotype and subtle discrimination issues and should therefore work together to achieve a common goal.
Online Reporter