Are women more empowered than men?

Gender empowerment. Gender equality. Women’s rights. All of these are buzzwords that have permeated our national psyche since the 1980s. After last year’s Kenya Certificate of Secondary School results were released, these terms stopped being ‘friendly’ and started to achieve a negative connotation. Of the 20 top-scoring students in the country, 16 were girls.

Ordinarily, this should be an achievement to celebrate but for a country as patriarchal as Kenya, it became the ‘reason’ for many anti-equality men. ‘The boy child has been abandoned.’ ‘Women have become too powerful.’ ‘Women are doing better than men these days,’ were some of the statements bandied about.

Is this really true? Has the women’s empowerment movement done so well that men are now disempowered? Or do women in Kenya still have a long way to go to catch up with men? Let’s let the statistics tell us. 

THE STUDY:

We used the latest (2014) Kenya Demographic & Health Survey, which sampled 40,300 households in all the counties in Kenya. The study analyses these parameters:

 education

 marital status and decision making

 employment and ownership

 wellness

 gender violence

Do women outnumber men?

It has long been thought that the population of women in Kenya outstrips that of men. This theory is used to justify polygamy, and to argue that women should be able to vote themselves into power seeing as they have the numbers. Let’s look at the numbers.

The 2009 census had Kenyans at a population of 38.6 million. May 2017 estimates fall at around 48.3 million. Male to female has remained constant at 1:1, dispelling the myth that women outnumber men. 

EDUCATION

According to the report, men are still more likely to be literate than women. Even though the proportion of both men and women who have no education has declined (from 13 to 11 per cent among men and 19 to 16 per cent among women), there are still more men than women who have completed a secondary school and further education. Similarly, the gap between the number of boy and girls in schools widens with age, meaning that as time progresses, many more girls than boys drop out of school.

5-10 years: More girls than boys in school (girls enroll earlier)

10-14 years: Number of girls and boys evens out

15 years and older: School attendance declines for both genders (but proportions are in favour of boys)

MARRIAGE

Older men are more likely to have more than one wife. Only 1 per cent of men aged 20 to 24 have more than one wife, compared to 11 per cent of men aged 45 to 49). For both genders, the less the education, the more likely they are to be in polygamous unions. Similarly, the more wealthy a man is, the less he is to be polygamous.

60% Number of women married or living in an informal union

51% Number of men married or living in an informal union

11% Number of women in a polygamous union

6% Number of men in as polygamous union

ACCESS TO INFORMATION

Compared to 10% of men, 23% of women are not exposed to any source of mass media. The most popular source of information, the radio, is accessed by 86% of men and 70% of women. Only 18% of women have access to a newspaper, compared to 41% of men.

Women above age 35, women in rural areas, and women in the Western region were more likely to engage in 10 minutes of continuous physical activity. Women with no education and women in the highest wealth quintile are less likely to be physically active for 10 minutes continuously. Men aged 29 and younger, and those in the Coast and North Eastern regions, are more likely to engage in 10 minutes of continuous physical activity than their counterparts. Men with a secondary or higher education were more likely to be physically active, as are men in the highest wealth quintile.

WOMEN VS MEN’S HEALTH & FITNESS

16% of men smoke cigarettes, compared to 1% of women.

Use of tobacco increases with age and is more common among men with no education and those in the lower wealth quintiles. According to the report, men are also more likely to consume alcohol than women (29% and 5% respectively). However, when it comes to daily consumption of alcohol among both genders, the numbers are higher among those with lower education levels and lower wealth quintiles.

45-49 – Ages reporting highest daily drinking among women

Above 30 – Ages reporting highest daily drinking among men

PROPERTY

Men are more likely to own property solely, while women are more likely to own property jointly. Compared to only 8% of women, 36% of men are the sole owners of a house. 28% of men are sole land owners, compared to only 7% of women.

EMPLOYMENT, EARNING AND OWNERSHIP

Only 75% of currently married women are employed; meanwhile, virtually all currently married men are employed. Of the employed women, 72% earn less than their husbands. Only a half of the women exclusively decide how their earnings are used – with the remainder (41%) making the decision jointly while the rest (9%) say decisions about their earnings are exclusively made by their husbands. 4% is the number of married men who said their wives are the main decision makers in use of their (husband’s) earnings. Although it doesn’t say what kind of work, the report says that 20% of women, as opposed to 7% of men, don’t get paid for the work they do.

80% - Men currently employed, and down from 86% in 2009

61% - Women currently employed, and up from 57% in 2009

CONCLUSION

Our KDHS numbers appear to point to a gender bias in favour of men. Kenya is still ranked in the ‘low human development group’ in the UNDP’s gender inequality index table (number 126 out of 155 countries).

As noted in the beginning, a ‘powerful’ male population does not equate to an empowered one. “Most gender initiatives continue to focus on women. This is understandable,” writes Maria Correia of the World Bank. “But as we argue, we need interventions targeting and supporting men for change.”

An example of how to achieve equality by empowering men, she outlines, can be began with simple sensitisations targeted towards men, such as:

1. Men who are victims of violence: need to break their silence and seek help

2. Men who use violence: need to seek help

3. Men who are silent spectators: need to speak out

4. Men who speak out: need to become agents of change

5. Men who are agents of change: need to continue to speak out and mobilise others