Dy­lan Ker­ri­g­an

Across the three cam­pus­es of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies there are a to­tal of 16 fac­ul­ty deans. The dean's job is a heavy one with a lot more "man" hours put in than many oth­er mem­bers of staff at the uni­ver­si­ty. I say "man" hours be­cause read­ing through the names of all the deans for the 2012/2013 aca­d­e­m­ic year there is a trend. Of the 16 names, all turn out to be men. Now peo­ple will have their per­son­al opin­ion on this lack of gen­der di­ver­si­ty.

Some may be aghast, while on the oth­er side there are no doubt some who think the sit­u­a­tion is as it should be. The moral ar­gu­ment is an easy one to make-in a re­gion where over half the pop­u­la­tion is fe­male that not one woman is rep­re­sent­ed as the head of a fac­ul­ty at our pre­mier in­tel­lec­tu­al in­sti­tu­tion is un­fair. And there are oth­er more prag­mat­ic points that can be raised than the moral.

For ex­am­ple, such a sit­u­a­tion re­in­forces the au­thor­i­ty of men and im­pedes non-mas­cu­line be­hav­iour and view­points. Pow­er is a struc­tur­al phe­nom­e­non. Its struc­ture shapes what we do and how we see the world. We all soak pow­er up cul­tur­al­ly. We are so­cialised in­to its world­view and in re­pro­duc­ing our dai­ly lives, re­la­tions and ideas, we re­pro­duce pow­er's codes and so­cial sys­tems. Pow­er likes to re­main hid­den and doesn't like to be ques­tioned.

In an­thro­pol­o­gy, how­ev­er, our job is to ques­tion pow­er and cri­tique how it works. Hence, a list of 16 men and no women soon be­comes cul­tur­al ev­i­dence of how pow­er is at work in wider lo­cal so­ci­ety. Some peo­ple hate the word "pa­tri­archy." It makes them run a mile. Even worse to such peo­ple is the word "fem­i­nism." For some it is a syn­onym for male bash­ing. Pa­tri­archy is the pow­er of the so­cial struc­ture to keep one group-men-in po­si­tions of pow­er over an­oth­er group-women.

Yet pa­tri­archy does not have to be some vast con­spir­a­cy by Dr Evil and his male cronies sit­ting in a room plot­ting against women to keep them down-it could be, but I'm hop­ing it's not. Pa­tri­archy can be sub­tle, un­in­tend­ed and nor­malised. In oth­er words, it can hap­pen even when peo­ple don't re­alise their de­ci­sion-mak­ing is ex­clu­sion­ary. The re­al­i­ty of the world and its many cul­tures is that men and women of­ten ex­pe­ri­ence the world dif­fer­ent­ly.

In an­thro­pol­o­gy class­es stu­dents learn that gen­ders are so­cial­ly-con­struct­ed be­hav­iour­al roles and that gen­der is a per­formed iden­ti­ty. Don't wor­ry, your sex as male or fe­male is a bi­o­log­i­cal fact and safe, that is, it is the same in any cul­ture; it is our gen­der roles as a "man" or a "woman" that are per­formed and re­spect­ed dif­fer­ent­ly across cul­tures.

None of this means that gen­der isn't re­al-that peo­ple do not have to con­front how their male or fe­male iden­ti­ty af­fects their re­la­tion­ship and ex­pe­ri­ence of the world. Nor does it mean that one gen­der is bet­ter than the oth­er, or that we all have a fixed male or fe­male iden­ti­ty. Rather it means that hu­man dif­fer­ence and di­ver­si­ty is nor­mal and es­sen­tial to the world; as it should be to UWI and our oth­er so­cial and po­lit­i­cal in­sti­tu­tions.

One ar­gu­ment sur­round­ing im­proved equal­i­ty be­tween men and women in our lo­cal so­ci­ety is that we now have a fe­male Prime Min­is­ter. Yes, this is a sig­nal of change with­in the cul­tur­al norms of our so­ci­ety. It had nev­er hap­pened be­fore so some­thing has changed. Yet us­ing the Prime Min­is­ter as ev­i­dence of struc­tur­al change falls in­to the same trap of us­ing Pres­i­dent Oba­ma to claim the US is a post-racial so­ci­ety. It just isn't true.

Think­ing about the gen­der im­bal­ance in fac­ul­ty deans at UWI is one way to think about progress in our re­gion. If the or­gan­i­sa­tion of pow­er in our so­ci­ety has not changed great­ly and is still cen­tred on the au­thor­i­ty of men, then who is progress for? But let us put it an­oth­er way: would it up­set peo­ple if all the fac­ul­ty deans at UWI were white or for­eign or both?

Would we let that one slide? Why is gen­der im­bal­ance dif­fer­ent? In the se­lec­tion of po­si­tions of guid­ance in our so­ci­ety we need a mech­a­nism for en­sur­ing male bias and pow­er are tru­ly chal­lenged and the de­mo­graph­ic re­al­i­ty of our so­ci­ety is re­flect­ed. Such a mech­a­nism will have last­ing ben­e­fits to our so­ci­ety well be­yond UWI.

• Dy­lan Ker­ri­g­an is an an­thro­pol­o­gist at UWI, St Au­gus­tine