GENDER equity is a foreign term for a simple concept.
Men and women should be able to access similar educational, employment and social opportunities.
Boy or girl, man or woman - a person's sex ideally should be neither an advantage nor a drawback throughout life.
Of course men and women are not the same, and gender equity does not claim that they are. Gender equity seeks to change the present destiny of individuals based on their sex, from the time they are born and all throughout their lives. This Wednesday, Education Minister Michael Laimo will launch Papua New Guinea's gender equity policy in Port Moresby.
Since recorded history began, girls and boys have been stereotyped for life. They grow into men and women within societies that expect them to behave in certain ways, follow certain occupations, and hold certain responsibilities and obligations. And generally, it is the women who have played a subservient role in this gender subvivision.
They have usually been cast as the homemaker, bearer of children, and in PNG, gardener. Their men have been the hunters, the explorers, the warriors, and at least in theory, the protectors of their families. While each gender or sex has had separate cultural roles to play in traditional PNG society, only a very few communities have recognised women as the equal of men, or even more rarely, given them land rights and tangible responsibilities within a tribe or clan.
The gender equity policy is long term, designed to gradually change societal attitudes and create equality of opportunity and community standing for men and women.
Many observers of life and culture in PNG have seriously doubted the country's capacity to achieve equality of opportunity and status. Yet there are enough extraordinary anomalies to the general rule of male supremacy in PNG to prompt further thought and investigation.
Since independence, women have enjoyed the right to stand for Parliament equally with men.
Few women have succeeded in becoming elected to the House. Few women - but not no women.
In the professions, PNG women excel at medicine, law, industrial realtions, finance and a host of other occupations.T he number of women undergraduates at our universities increases annually. Parliamentary membership or professional qualifications at a high level would have been unthinkable for PNG women two generations ago.
They are increasingly understood today by male-dominated PNG society.
From being viewed as colourful and unique individuals representing singular exceptions to a universal rule, educated women are becoming an accepted part of the professional and political PNG landscape.
The "pink is for girls, blue is for boys" syndrome, which finds babies sorted into categories while they are toddlers, defines the attitudes of their parents towards them, determines what games each gender should play, and often makes major sacrifices to send boys to school, while girls stay home, are some of the concerns the gender policy hopes to address. It won't be easy.
Most of PNG society, in common with many others, has historically viewed its women as the responsibility of, and subservient to, men.
When historically external events defined what men and women could achieve, this perception of women was perhaps a necessity.
Hostilities with adjoining tribes, the need to hunt or fish and make or find shelter were the responsibility of the men.
The birth of children, essential to the future of the tribe, and the sustenance to nurture them and the men of the family were the obligations of the women.
But those externally defined roles, even in our most remote rural areas, are fading fast, and in our cities and our contemporary education system, they should have no place.
Women form almost half of our population. Quite apart from their rights, we cannot afford as a nation to deliberately discount the part women can and should play in nation-building.
Today, given the informed choice and the opportunity, very few would choose to play out their lives powerless, uneducated, undervalued and devoid of hope or ambition.
The gender equity policy to be launched by Minister Laimo will seek to rectify that inbuilt imbalance, and further strengthen PNG's claims to being a democratic and equable society.
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