Gender was not an obstacle to Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s battle for the post of UNC Political Leader. If anything, gender helped her to win.
In an Express column of February 5 titled “The ascension of Kamla”, feminist Sheila Rampersad writes, “In 1993, Ramabai Espinet articulated the studied observations of several academics when she wrote: ‘In every quarter of activity, whether in art, literature, and public life or otherwise, the Indian woman is under-represented and, where she is represented, she is not seen as an equal participant.’” Rampersad concludes that this is “the legacy of colonialism and indentureship”, but adduces no evidence to support her assertion.
In fact, it is more likely that colonialism and indentureship helped raise the status of Indo-Trinidadian women. As Rampersad notes, there was a great disparity in the ratio of women to men among the Indian indentured labourers. She concludes that this “created social relations problems between men and women in the sugar estates. Tensions and jealousies resulted from the numerical disparity, leading to the infamous Coolie Wife Murders between 1872 and 1900.”
Certainly, the skewed male-female ratio was a key factor in these murders, but Rampersad omits to specify that almost all the killings had as their cause infidelity on the part of the woman. It is also curious that she does not invoke the standard feminist shibboleth of the “patriarchal society” to explain the supposed inequality of the Indian woman. But to do so would be to criticise the values of Indian society and the women: and that’s not politically correct. (The “patriarchal society”  is a shibboleth because such a term implies the corollary of a matriarchal society but, as even the feminist icon Margaret Mead has noted, “All the claims so glibly made about societies ruled by women are nonsense. We have no reason to believe they ever existed.”)
An economic perspective suggests why this initial male-female disparity would lead to a long-term advantage for Indo-Trini females. Any goods which are both scarce and in high demand rise in price. Aware of their new value in the sugar colony, Indian women now had incentives to maximise that advantage in ways they could not have in India, and such incentives would certainly have overcome the weaker restraints of culture and tradition. As historian K.O. Laurence observes in his book A Question of Labour, “Apart from the fickle business of sexual attraction, the material rewards of exchanging one man for another could be considerable and the rate of turnover was quite high. It is also noteworthy that Indian women in the West Indies enjoyed a more independent status than in India, receiving their own wages, sometimes handling their husband’s money, and being generally conscious of a new freedom of action.”
This may well have been the basis for Indian women taking advantage of educational opportunities. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Indian women from the first waves of indentureship insisted that their daughters go to school, and it also seems that Indian fathers often encouraged, or at least did not oppose, their daughters getting an education. Certainly, in the 21st century, Indo-Trinidadian women are better off than their sisters in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The United Nation’s Gender Empowerment Measure—which is based on women’s economic and political participation, as well as control over economic resources—ranks Trinidad and Tobago 23rd out of 93 countries (high to low). Bangladesh is ranked 81st  and Pakistan 82nd . There is no UN data for India, but the World Values Survey places that nation 47th out of 61 countries on a gender equality scale. If colonialism and indentureship did indeed stymie Indian women, as Rampersad argues, why aren’t the women in these countries enjoying greater equality than Indo-Trini women?
Interestingly, Guyana also ranks far below T&T in gender measures, ranking 88th out of 157 countries to T&T’s 56th place. Yet, in the indentureship period, the male-female ratio in that colony was less unbalanced, as shown in Table 1. This might be adduced as evidence that the greater scarcity of Indian women in Trinidad helped their long-term prospects as a group; at the very least, it undermines the thesis that the skewed sex ratio was the key variable in Indian women’s purported lack of status.
Local feminists have long downplayed the real gains made by women in this country over the past half-century.  A 2008 International Labour Office Report prepared by Rhoda Reddock and Yvonne Bobb-Smith says that women in the TT public sector are paid slightly more than their male counterparts, whereas in the private sector they typically get just four-fifths the salaries of men who do the same jobs. The Report’s authors used data from the CSO’s Labour Force Reports 1998-2001 to conclude that “Differences in women’s and men’s income were greatest at the senior legislative and management level and craft and related workers. Between 1998 and 2000, there were limited improvements in all sectors, except for professionals, where there was some deterioration.”
But why is this? The theme of the Report is that sexism in some form underlies all the disparity. However, psychologist Susan Pinker has surveyed the international literature on the income gap and notes in her book The Sexual Paradox that “When we look at what work women choose in countries that offer them the widest array of options – Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, the United States, and Japan – we find the highest rates of gender disparity…Women still do more freelance and contract work than men…in the process becoming invisible teleworkers, neither subject to labour norms nor counted as official employees with a chance to move up. The willingness of many women to trade a stable salary for flexible hours adds to the global wage gap.”

When the feminists are forced to acknowledge progress, however, they often claim that this has come about because of the feminist movement. But there are more concrete factors which account for the increased equality of T&T women. For example, in 1975 just under half of all children enrolled in school were females, but already more than half of all persons employed in the education sector were women, with 50 percent of all teachers with university degrees being female. Nowadays, 65 percent of all teachers are women, they make up two-thirds of teachers with a university degree, and more than half of all teachers with secondary education. And, at the tertiary level, over 60 percent of students are female.
Women are also more financially independent than they were 30 years ago. In the 1970s, women made up 32 percent of the labour force, while now they make up 50 percent. Data from the Central Statistical Office show that women account for 43 percent of all legislators, senior officials, and managers; 48 percent of all professionals; and 54 percent of all technicians and associate professionals.
Thirty years ago, women made up only 38 percent of government workers at administrative, professional, and technical levels.
The 2006 Labour Force Report, also indicates that more female professionals earn mid-level salaries ($6,000 to $11,000) than males. The most common age of marriage for women has also moved from the 15-19 age cohort to the 20-24 one.
These figures naturally translate into progressive attitudes. The 2008 Status of Women and Children Report, for example, says that 93 percent of women do not think a man can ever have a good reason for beating his spouse. And in a 2006 WVS survey of T&T, only 21 percent of persons thought men made better executives than women, while 69 percent of respondents disagreed with the statement that “Men make better political leaders than women”.
So Kamla’s victory in the UNC internal election was, if considered purely as a gender issue, unsurprising in light of these data. She could not have been elected if attitudes toward women in general, and Indian women in particular, had not undergone significant shifts since the days of indentureship. But, without the shortage of Indian women back then, sexist attitudes might not have changed so drastically within just four generations.

Behavioral etiquette on the Internet is something that is very much in flux, so there is no right way to respond to public outrage. Nevertheless, it is often very instructive to see how people do respond to being called out for perceived misdemeanors, and sometimes you can see people getting it very wrong.

When Maura McHugh complained about a book of interviews with horror writers not containing any women, the publishers, the British Fantasy Society, were immediately very contrite. Chairman Guy Adams penned this response, of which a key paragraph is:

It is disgustingly simple for a man not to notice these things, a blindness to the importance of correct gender representation that I feel embarrassed to have fallen into.

That’s simple and honest. Guy, as the man at the top, stuck his hand up and took responsibility. There was no question of making excuses, or trying to duck the issue. A job well done.

Recently SFX magazine published a horror special that also largely ignored women in the field. Maura challenged this too. The response, from editor Ian Berriman, was very different.

Berriman starts off in victim politics mode. It took the poor fellow three months to put that issue together. It’s not fair, he suggests, that someone should attack it over something as trivial, to his mind, as the number of women mentioned.

The rest of his response is full of excuses, and additional attacks on McHugh’s right to complain. There is talk of emails going astray (would Berriman have made more of an effort to make contact had the author in question been someone he felt was important, rather than just a woman?). There is supposed support from conveniently anonymous female horror fans (yes, “the lurkers support him in email”). Berriman goes to great lengths to show how he rigorously defined the people he would write about, most of whom happened to be male, and doesn’t see any irony in this. Indeed, he appears to be at pains to define what “horror” means to him, and that definition seems to include, “not the sort of stuff that women usually write.”

Perhaps most telling of all, Berriman admits there was one woman writer whom he should have included, but forgot to do so. There were, of course, many other women he might have included as well, but he appears to be unaware of them. As Guy Adams said, it is disgustingly easy for men not to notice these things; for them to be simply be unaware that they have missed out a huge section of the market they are supposed to be covering. And in Berriman’s case, even after having had his omission pointed out to him, to be unable to see that he has done anything wrong, or that anyone has any right to complain about what he has done.

This is why it is necessary to complain. There are all sorts of good reasons why a survey of writers in almost any market other than romance should be male-dominated. Horror may well be worse than most (though I happen to know of three top-class horror novels by women published last year, all of which have been widely praised, and one of which I have read and was hugely impressed by). But all bell curves have tails, and to completely ignore women in such a survey suggests that a lot of “forgetting” has taken place; that women are out of sight and out of mind. And if they are marginalized in this way, then of course their books will sell less well, they’ll be less famous, and people like Berriman will have more excuses for not talking about them. Only by complaining about their absence, as McHugh has done, can women writers be brought back into the spotlight, and only then will people like Mr. Berriman stop “forgetting” them.