Carolyn Cooper, Contributor

Cooper

If you've been reading Edward Seaga's insightful newspaper columns, you'll know why I call him 'Prof'. His brilliant post-election analysis of class politics in Jamaica made me mischievously suggest to him that, perhaps, he should have stayed in academia instead of going into politics. He laughed knowingly. He might have had a far more rewarding intellectual life.

But, like many Jamaican men who either choose not to go to university or are not qualified to enter for a variety of reasons, Mr. Seaga decided to make his career in the 'real' world. You know, not in the 'intellectual ghetto', as my sparring partner Wilmot Perkins perversely loves to say.

In his intriguing In Focus column published last Sunday, Mr. Seaga focuses on the gender imbalance among students at the University of the West Indies and at high schools across Jamaica. The title of the article, '82:18, that's my number!', cleverly reminds us of Toots Hibbert's big tune, 54 :46. The full hundred. By making this connection to the reggae music industry, Mr. Seaga seems to be subliminally suggesting one of the mai to formal education in Jamaica today, especially for young men.

Toots' 'number' also reminds us that many young men who ought to be in school are actually in prison. A whole different kind of education. Some may be literally imprisoned in a penal institution. Others are trapped in stereotypes about what is appropriate male and female behaviour.

teaching feminised

These days, the teaching profession has been feminised; but not at the highest levels of administration - remnants of the old order. As Professor Errol Miller knows so well, there was a time when the profession was male-dominated. To become a teacher or a parson was a grand ambition for a poor, black man in the post-slavery period. But as better-paid jobs became available in law and medicine, for example, men abandoned the teaching profession. So who really 'marginalised' men? The men themselves.

Women, newly emancipated from domestic service, stepped into place. The low pay was better than no pay at all. Teaching gave women relative economic independence as

we were able to make a half-decent living for ourselves. This was, and still is, especially important for black women who are not often the first choice of partner for black men. We often have to fend for ourselves. But that's a whole other story. These days both law and medicine are now feminised and men have again marginalised themselves in better-paid careers - some of them decidedly illegal.

GLOBAL TREND

Quite frankly, I'm not as bothered as some of my colleagues are about the 82:18 gender imbalance at the University of the West Indies. First of all, it's not a local issue. It's a global trend. And even though more and more women are getting certificates in this and that, all of these diplomas do not necessarily translate into greater job security. At the top end of the market, women have to be overqualified to get the jobs men take for granted.

At the bottom end, young men who go on the job market immediately after high school are often way ahead of women who invest three years in a first degree and another two in a postgraduate programme. Many of these men are actually helping women through university. They know that when 'money done, love done', as proverbial wisdom warns.

Macka Diamond's entertaining novel Bun Him! brilliantly illustrates this point. The two main female characters are students at a teachers' college in Kingston. One is married to a man who could be her father. His sexual skills are quite poor but he has the money to compensate for his deficiencies. But only for so long. You know 'im going to get bun. The other young woman deh with a taxi driver who does not have the money to keep her in the style to which she aspires. You know 'im going to get bun.

SEXUAL CONFIDENCE

There's another aspect of this 82:18 'problem' that is very troubling. If we're not careful, we can make female students feel guilty about their academic accomplishments. It's as if women are robbing men of their rightful place in university. But this is not the case. The underachievement of men is not the fault of women. And we should not have to small up ourselves to make men feel big. In any case, as Mr. Seaga's account of the doctor and the 'ductor' so vividly illustrates, many men feel absolutely no sense of inferiority in relationship to women who have more formal education than they. But I have a different take than 'Prof' on the matter. Mr. Seaga interprets the ductor's readiness to take on the doctor as coming "obviously, from a position of ignorance". But it's not ignorance at all. It's supreme self-confidence. And it's truly admirable.

Unlike the average Jamaican woman who might see a rather attractive man and wistfully regret that he's outside her league, the average Jamaican man has no concept of a league - 'im a man; and that's enough. I wish we women had the same degree of sexual confidence. Pun definitely intended. We could really take lessons from our men.

I think we need to do far more subtle analyses, and talk much less sensationally about the gender imbalance at the University of the West Indies. For example, what gender patterns emerge when you look not at the total statistics but at segments of the market?

It was a male student who first pointed out to me several years ago that there's a slightly higher percentage of men in the part-time programmes at UWI than in the full time. This makes perfectly good sense. Money-o! Men often cannot afford the luxury of full-time study. They have to work. And what are the gender ratios in different faculties and for different programmes? Engineering, for example, continues to be a male-dominated faculty at the St. Augustine campus in Trinidad. And at Mona, there is almost gender equity in the undergraduates programme in the pure and applied sciences. Why is this so? Should the University of the West Indies be investing in programmes that appeal to men as a form of affirmative action?

The Reggae Studies Unit at UWI this year introduced an innovative, inter-disciplinary undergraduate degree programme in 'entertainment and cultural enterprise management'. What is the gender imbalance in the programme? Of the 21 students selected, 11 are female and 10 are male. Eleven:10, that's my unit's number! I rest my case.