A Woman for President?

This is the question I put to my Grade 9 Civics class. We had been studying democracy and, most specifically, the threats to democracy. One of the threats that the textbook listed was that women tend to not be involved in public life - they don't vote as much as men and they don't run for office. This could be said for the Western world as well, but it is especially true here.

I was expecting my question to be rhetorical. Certainly the students have been taught something to at least answer the question correctly even if they didn't believe it. To my surprise, however, I found myself debating the merits of females in politics. My male students told me that no, a woman could not be a president. "Why not?" I probed. I was told that a woman would be too vulnerable to being influenced by men. Additionally, neighbouring nations would think that they could sway Zambia too easily because of the female president. Men, I was told, were more objective, more reasonable, and less swayed by emotion. Once I lifted my jaw off the floor after hearing such nineteenth-century chauvinism I tried to counter by pointing out that many women had been successful leaders and also tried to counter the charge that women were some how less objective than their male counterparts.

What was surprising to me about this incident was not the beliefs that the kids had. After all, women are treated like second class citizens in many ways here. (Although, interesting, a large proportion of the police force is female - I don't know how to explain that phenomenon). What did surprise me was that they would actually come out and say it and then vigorously defend their position. Schools, I had thought, at least paid lip service to the idea of equality in a theoretical sense.

I guess Zambia won't be having a woman president any time soon.