Agnes Lam: Gender issues still marginalized

This year’s upcoming International Women’s Day is themed “Make it happen: Celebrate women’s achievements, call for greater equality”. In order to achieve that in Macau, local scholar and civil group leader Agnes Lam suggested that women need to be more outspoken, while the government should formulate policies to improve gender equality.
Ms Lam stressed on the sidelines of a seminar held on Gender Politics at the University of Macau that there are still many issues on local women’s status that are not being addressed in public.
The scholar argues that gender equality seems to be “a hot topic in the past few months,” because of the debate around the domestic violence bill – a debate that is not “about the broader sense of gender equality,” she said.
Several examples of gender issues that haven’t been discussed much were listed by the academic, such as the right to abortion, insufficient days of maternity leave, as well as a lack of female management positions.
“Abortion is illegal here in Macau, but it’s legal in mainland China, so people can just go across the border to do abortions. Should we think about that? We don’t have any public figures that are fighting for the autonomy of women; we don’t even talk about if people should have the right to choose abortion or not,” she indicated.
Another field that needs to be looked into is the protection of women’s labor rights, she said, as ten percent of women in Macau have to give up working due to family obligations. Moreover, women – as the city’s major workforce – still hold a “not very satisfactory” ratio of management level positions.
“None of these have been discussed, basically,” said the scholar. “If there is a policy that can take care of their concern or their needs, they can work or at least work part time,” she added.
Lam also stressed that “gender issues or women’s issues are always marginalized in Macau, especially in the Chinese media.” According to her research, there was only one domestic violence story published on a front page in the past fifteen years. And the main reason is that “women themselves don’t speak out.”
“Because women don’t talk about their concerns in the public sphere, it’s very hard for us to understand their needs, how should we bring their concerns into the political world?” she questioned, adding that merely three percent of local women in a survey said they had voiced out publicly about their issues.
The scholar, who also leads the “Macao Civic Power” group, further acknowledged that participating in political affairs hasn’t been easy for women either, and female politicians might often follow the “male agenda” rather than suggesting “gender-based” issues.
“The situation is improving a lot more. But still we don’t have enough organizations or groups to engage women and so we lack some kind of collective force or collective voice to talk about women’s issues,” she emphasized.
Lam went on to suggest that women’s associations in the city “traditionally focus more on the services for childcare, school and medical care.” “They need to be more outspoken about other issues, new issues and hidden issues,” she said. BY

Lack of transparency on domestic violence

The Macau Anti-Domestic Violence Coalition Group was one of the organizations that yesterday expressed concerns with “the lack of transparency” regarding the Legislative Assembly (AL) First Standing Committee’s debate of the Domestic Violence Prevention and Correction Law. They say that the committee, presided over by Kwan Tsui Hang, could be trying to reverse the legislation previously approved at the AL plenary meeting, where the domestic violence bill passed its first reading.
“We are really concerned because the debate is not open to the public and is not transparent. We fear that there could be a risk of backtracking, which would mean a disregard of the law’s purpose [regarding domestic violence as a public crime]. So we ask journalists to enquire about the Public Prosecutions Office, judges and police’s opinion on this matter. We hope that the new versions of the law will be made public so we can keep debating [the issue],” said Melody Lu, the group’s spokesperson.
Under the current proposed domestic violence legislation, the Penal Code will be amended with another clause added to one of its articles. This new clause will enable the public prosecutors to actively indict perpetrators who have assaulted a family member, resulting in a consequence that is “not mild.”