Must they look the part?
Last week I appeared to have touched some raw nerves with the piece I named Maybe we want them to steal.
I shall leave, for the moment, the many reactions to the main point of the article, which was to draw attention to the ways in which our society contributes to the pressures on public officials that might lead to corruption.
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I hope the conversation engendered by the article will continue and we might hopefully learn a few lessons.
I was intrigued by the reaction of a young friend of mine, who said the article was “dangerous”, because according to her, it raises too many uncomfortable questions. To which
I say, long may we continue to raise uncomfortable questions.
There is one aspect of the piece that I wish to explore further simply because even though I made the point in the article, I confess I did not realise it was such a serious and widespread problem.
I wrote that there was a lot of pressure on females who are in the public eye about their wardrobes. This appeared to have opened the floodgates to a huge problem that is hidden in plain sight.
I suppose there is nothing new about women being judged on how they look rather than on what they do or how they do things.
But since there seems to be universal agreement that we should have more females in public office, I had hoped we would be more interested in their brains than their looks and their clothes.
I have of course been following with keen interest the furore that arose over President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo’s feminist credentials.
I am also following the agitation about how many women there are in government, in the judiciary, in parliament and other positions.
I notice and comment on the optics from every official function and I mark what the gender relativities are.
Adding colour
It took a while for me to be convinced that we needed a women’s wing in political parties.
If we are told that females are about 51 per cent of the population, and therefore constitute the majority, it seemed strange to me that there would be a women’s wing, when we should be in the majority.
A special wing should be for minorities? A six feet wing maybe, because very few Ghanaians are six feet tall.
A youth wing by all means, for as long as we don’t have 40-something-year-olds claiming to be youth.
Then it turns out that we want females to be appointed to serve in government and other important positions, not because we believe they have something to contribute, but because we want them to add colour.
The women are screened for their hair styles, their clothes and accessories, their nails, their make-up and people are unforgiving when they think the women fall short of some standard.
Some of the women unfortunately feel the pressure so much they try to acquire new personalities and end up losing track of what they are supposed to do.
The problem is that you require a lot of money and a lot of time to look glamorous all the time. The type of money that is way beyond what the job offers.
The type of time that you do not and cannot have if you are to do your job well.
It is not generally known and appreciated the amount of time and money and reverential worship that is required to keep the black female hair in the state that would be deemed acceptable.
The next time you see a woman on the television and you don’t listen to what she is saying but feel obliged to comment on her appearance, and by that, I refer to the look of the whole ensemble, spare a thought for the effort it has taken.
She has needed the services of a hairdresser, a manicurist, a makeup artiste, and she has probably fallen out with her dressmaker because her outfit has been in the making for weeks, maybe months and she has spent hours fitting.
She must have shoes that match with her handbag and nobody should be able to notice that the same pair was worn to the last event. The jewellery she wears can start and maintain a conversation for weeks.
Every part of this ensemble can be, and is often regularly subjected to the greatest scrutiny.
As many young women have told me this past week, the scrutiny and pressure can be intimidating. None of this of course has anything to do with the core business of being a female Minister or Headmistress or Judge or Speaker, or Governor of the Bank, or Presidential Staffer, or
Bank Manager, or Professor, or Medical Doctor, or Project manager, or Chief engineer, or Chief of Staff or Editor or any of the positions that we want more women to occupy.
But unless the watching world approves of your appearance, they are not about to even start measuring the job you are doing. Every conversation about your performance starts, and if you are not lucky, would end with your clothes.
Looking the part
The day I was told it might be a good idea to have many eye glasses with different style frames, I decided I cannot and would not play the game of trying to look the part.
Especially since I am certain no male of the specie in a public job has ever been told to wear glasses with frames that match an outfit.
I don’t hear anyone discuss the clothes that male Ministers of State wear.
I have never heard anyone notice, never mind discuss what clothes are worn by the various male Chief of Staffs we have had, but Madam Akosua Frema Osei Opare is scrutinised and dissected from head to toe every day.
I concede that this is not an exclusively Ghanaian problem. I recall an interview Michelle Obama gave after she and her husband had left the White House.
She said that during their eight years in the White House, whilst her every dress, bag, shoe and necklace choice was scrutinised and commented upon, her husband Barack, the President, wore “the same tuxedo and the same shoes for eight years”. Okay, it turned out he wore two tuxedos instead of the one, but the point is made, I believe.
I suspect some people would say it is fair to expect our First Ladies and Second Ladies to set the fashion tone and scrutinising what they wear, comes with the territory.
But I wonder how far we are ready to take this assertion. How much should be allocated in the budget for their wardrobes so they can satisfy this wish of the public.
Should women therefore be paid extra to meet their wardrobe demands and should that cover all females or only females in certain positions?
If the women dress and look the part, will they be judged then by what is in their heads?
