MIA Mottley, attorney general and deputy prime minister of Barbados, is calling on CARICOM nations to address gender issues in their national constitutions in order to entrench the concept and processes of social justice within the region.

“We have to look at the issue of gender justice as integral to our pursuit of social justice. But there is little or no mention of gender in the majority of our constitutions. Although we have come a far way in enacting specific pieces of legislation to protect gender equality, most of us are yet to enshrine this concept in our constitutions,” she said.

Mottley was delivering the keynote address at the opening of the 2003 Mona Academic Conference on “Gender in the 21st Century”, held on the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) from August 29-31.

It was during this address that Mottley also raised an objection to the inclusion of ‘male problems’ on the agenda of the fifth annual Mona Academic Conference dealing with “Gender in the 21st Century: Perspectives, Visions and Possibilities”.

“Introducing men’s problems into our gender discussion may be a way of taking us away from the goal of social justice that we have set ourselves,” Mottley said, in obvious reference to professor Errol Miller’s presentation on “The Male Marginalisation Theory Revisited,” that was scheduled for the following day.

Commenting on Mottley’s remarks during his presentation on Saturday, Miller said: “If we’re talking about gender, it is still two.”

Miller added that when he introduced the matter of male marginalisation at the Aubrey Phillips Memorial lecture in 1986, it was described in some quarters as “male chauvinism parading as scientific research”, but that subsequent events, especially with regard to the superior academic performances of females over males in Jamaica and other Caribbean states, have confirmed the soundness of his thesis.

“We need to account for the phenomenon of male marginalisation within a holistic view of gender,” Miller told a packed audience in the Social Science lecture theatre.

The head of education at the UWI described marginalisation as “a social fact, not a pathological disease”, and suggested that “the concept of patriarchy should be defined in terms of genealogy, gender and generation rather than as “men’s oppression of women”.

Mottley also used the occasion to praise the work of the UWI’s Centre for Gender and Development Studies (CGDS), organisers of the conference, for its role in informing and inspiring policy development in the region since the centre’s establishment in 1993.

“The work of the CGDS in teaching, research and outreach throughout the Caribbean was instrumental in the efforts to position social justice and the dignity of each human being at the centre of government and regional policy, even though there are other forces seeking to place ‘the market’ and other theories at the center,” said the Barbadian deputy PM.

She also recommended the Barbadian model of a ‘social partnership’ of trade unions, the private sector, the government and civil society as a means of “moving forward together” as a country.

“Much is being written and spoken in about ‘government’ and not enough on the process of ‘governance’…We need elements of governance that have to do with the processes of ensuring transparency, accountability and a participatory approach to be framed as rules for how members of society react to each other,” Mottley added.

The 3-day conference examined a raft of issues including, Gender, History Education and Development in Jamaica; Gender and Schooling: Implications for Teacher Education; Challenging Gender Privileging; Caribbean Masculinities and Femininities: The Impact of Globalisation on Cultural Representations and Masculinity, the Political Economy of the Body, and Patriarchal Power in the Caribbean.