Feminists demand gender equality

TALLINN - Men should be strong, they must not cry. Women must understand and forgive. Men must be in control. Women should submit - and be paid less, too.

Looking steadily westward, Estonia should have ostensibly put to rest these attitudes left over from the patriarchal Soviet empire and have traded them in eagerly for more modern views over the past nine years. That it may have done on many accounts - but not when it comes to gender equality.

The conclusion reached at the March 24-25 conference at the Tallinn Pedagogical University, "Estonian Women as Future Citizens in the European Union" Estonia has a long way to go before it can claim it has equal rights for its female population.

During the two-day event sponsored by the Estonian Women's Studies and Resource Center, women's activists and government leaders signed a petition, putting pressure on Parliament to ratify all articles of the Council of Europe's Social Charter. Several of the articles had been rejected in November, including one regarding equal pay for equal work, because parliamentarians said Estonia wasn't ready.

Iivi Masso of the Central European University didn't agree with their logic.

"We can't wait for the law to be ratified for attitudes to change. The legislation will have an impact on attitudes," she said.

The presentations drew heavily upon a United Nations report released at the beginning of the year, "Toward a Balanced Society: Women and Men in Estonia," which confirmed Estonia as a nation is straggling behind in views on gender and equality.

According to Voldemar Kolga, head of Tallinn Pedagogical University's women's studies center, Estonians are often ironical about the political correctness of the West.

"[They hint] that it is only a facade. . .Of course it is a facade, but it is also known sooner or later that every facade starts to exert an influence on what is inside," he wrote in the UN report.

The conference's speakers agreed that a lack of women's rights is sooner laughed at than acknowledged by the mainstream population.

"The phrase we hear so often in Estonia is, 'We have no problem whatsoever with gender equality. We don't even differentiate between 'he' and 'she' in our language,'" stressed Petra Lantz, United Nations resident coordinator. "People say, 'I'm not a feminist,' as if it's an infectious disease."

One of the keynote speakers, Siiri Oviir, knows what it's like to be in a "men's club." Oviir, as deputy speaker of the Parliament, sees few women around her at her job. There are just 18 female MP's out of 101 members.

Oviir, along with other leaders, repeatedly expressed concern that Estonian women's salaries are not only unequal with men's, but the trend has inexplicably been going in the wrong direction.

In 1992, Estonian women were earning 80 percent of men's salaries - the same as in today's European Union member states. The wage gap, presumably, should have closed with the introduction of democracy and Westernization. Instead, women are now earning 63 percent - 65 percent of their male counterparts' salaries. Lantz noted that Estonia's wage gap is larger than both Latvia and Lithuania's.

"This affects Estonia's accession into the EU directly," warned Oviir. In order for Estonia to be considered a serious contender, it must strengthen its equal rights record to prove that the country attempts to guarantee all citizens the same rights, including equal pay for women, as stated in the article voted down for ratification in the COE's Social Charter.

She said that gender issues in Estonia traditionally have been tossed aside as a "social problem" to deal with later.

However, Masso declared that equal rights is a prerequisite to a functioning, civilized society - not a luxury to afford when everything else is okay.

"Instead of risking the image of being a noisemaker, women submit to the discriminatory pressure of the media," she said.

Marika Linntam, an activist from the University of Tartu, implored Estonians to confess that inequality exists, and to abandon the gender stereotype that "little boys play war and little girls play in the kitchen."

One after another, the speakers asserted the need for Estonians to become more conscious of the problem, calling upon women to abandon their passivity and demand equality in legislation and social treatment.

"We wanted to get away from the USSR," concluded Masso, "because we wanted human rights. If we want to belong to a world that considers human rights, we must require women's rights."