By Kate Morioka, Research Project Manager
At the crack of dawn the women of Aisiko are up fetching water needed for the day and preparing breakfast for their families. Once breakfast is over, women get ready to go to the garden, where they will spend 4-6 hours tending to their crops. Aside from taking a couple of short breaks to drink water, women work through into the afternoon, then they head back to their homes before walking down to the stream to fetch water for the evening. There they do the clothes washing and carefully watch over their children who playfully swim in the rock pool. Then they will fill up numerous bottles with stream water and head back to their homes to prepare the evening meal. Once everyone is fed, they tend to the clean up and prepare for the next day, and often they can be the last ones to go to bed.
Whether the woman is young or old, or if they have young children or not, she is responsible for performing household duties and taking care of children. Culture defines the role and responsibilities of women, determining the types of duties and accountability they have. At the same time, culturally defined gender norms can delineate the rights of women, which in turn can lead to the exclusion of women from certain activities.
Women are likely to exercise a high degree of influence within their homes because of the domestic and reproductive roles they perform. They can make decisions about what food to grow and harvest in their gardens, what household items to buy or how much of their household incomes they should contribute to church, school, community or family activities. They can also make decisions about the delegation of household chores.
Whilst women may have control over decisions about household affairs, their participation in decision making is likely to stop there.
At the community level, only a handful of women are likely to be appointed to leadership positions. They are most likely to be representative spokespeople for other women in the community. Some women may go onto become leaders at the provincial level but not at the national level – Solomon Islands is one of 12 nations in the world with no female parliamentarians (five of them are in the Pacific region. Next year, PNG will be added to this list when its only female member of parliament, Dame Carol Kidu, retires from office).
For women in Solomon Islands to fully realise their rights, they must be recognised and valued beyond their domestic and reproductive roles. Cultural norms that deny women of their participation in the public sphere need to be challenged and changed. Women have the right to be treated as equals. Failing to do so is pretending that the other half of the population doesn’t exist.
