Reports of these sort usually look at all groups – including white, Hindu, Chinese and so on. They then look at the lowest cohorts which in this case are the Bangladeshis and the Pakistanis. My point is that these two south asian groups are also the most deprived economically. The statistics speak for themselves. That doesn’t mean we are looking to blame things on others. It simply means that we ask why this is the case and presumably we ask why because we’re interested in seeing a more egalitarian society.

My point about wine tasting and Queens Park Rangers wasn’t a racist point. I guess I was being subtle but was in fact talking about different people’s class related habits and hobbies. A white working class person might struggle to talk about spending the weekend at Wimbledon and a posh person might struggle to talk about QPR – a Pakistani or Bangladeshi might struggle with the wine and the QPR. The point is that our informal activities shouldn’t ‘cement’ our work relationships as increasingly the job market is full of different types of people – after all, that is what is meant by globalisation. In order for businesses to do well they gotta change – that is not just my expectation but it’s the only way for businesses to survive, this principle also applies to the individuals who work in organisations. In the private sector in the past 25 years this is accepted – and this diversification argument is applied to the different skills that minority groups now bring into the workplace. Many people argue that old boys network, Oxbridge networks are exclusive and should not be tolerated- that is exactly what I mean by informal connections and sociability. Old boys networks sustain the professional culture of businesnes and organisations but there is recognition that this isn’t progressive or good for competition – and so yes, many would agree with me that professional cultures ought to be more accomodating. That is not the same as blaming others – it is workign towards a more skilled economy.

Just because I can’t relate to wine tasting doesn’t make me racist – I am sure you didn’t mean to imply this. As to your incredibly successful Asian females who have negotiated their workplace – that’s great , but I have a few anecodates I can relate which can prove the opposite and that’s why we rely on independent research and policy to guide us – the trick i think is not to generalise from your neighbour and my neighbour.

If we followed your argument, most feminist analysis of the workplace would also be wrong, I guess. But do men and women enjoy equal pay ? I think not. Even our white sisters are grappling with this one.

You raised many points but Sunny seems to have written a broader response which picks up on some of my points .
But I just want to come back with one thing. Who said wine tasting is evil? I just said I can’t relate to it and that my reptation at work shouldn’t be affected by it. I should be judged on my work outcomes, and not whether i can hang out in the Groucho Club or the Working Men’c Club.

I think it’s better to leave moral language out of debates – words like evil are a bit much!

I agree. I think that the UK class system is still a major factor. For example, if you take your average upper-middle-class English “lite” racist (as in someone who secretly finds ethnic minorities unsettling but is not sufficiently excited about it to join ranks with the BNP, and I think there are a lot of those around), they might whinge about minorities but when their back’s against the wall they’d rather live next to well-off middle-class non-English/non-White family than not-nearly-as-well-off working class white English families, and that tends to mix up what at first looks like straightforward racism. I think that this might be as much about where people are perceived to slot into the class system as it is about straightforward discrimination based on ethnicity.

The report would have been more intersting had they included Hindu and Sikh women in the study group. Why do you think they didnt?

1) The report makes it clear that a focus only on “cultural factors” – which suggest that the problem lies with the women themselves because they don’t have the skills or have families who don’t want them to work – misses the point for many of today’s increasingly well educated and ambitious young Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Black Caribbean women, especially those born and educated in Britain.

2) 90 percent of Pakistani and Bangladeshi girls say they have the support of their families in pursuing their education and career aspirations rather than being expected to get married and have children — not far behind the 97% of white girls who say this.

As it is, women have discrimination in that they’re not easily promoted to senior levels (across all races) or questioned unnecessarily about their family structures of plans to get married etc.

I suspect its taken a few years for men to get over gender discrimination (though they haven’t entirely) and now they’re applying this to Muslim women to a certain degree.

But the waters get muddied because the same should not apply, in theory, to Afro-Carribean women. Which suggests this analysis is a bit simplistic.

I think people’s experiences are going to be different. In certain environments there isn’t an emphasis on after-work mingling, in others there is.

There was a recent report by the gay-rights group Stonewall that said the same thing – the drinking, mixing and macho culture in the city put many gays at a disadvantage. So I’d say this can apply to a whole disparate bunch of people.

I must ask my tee-total cousin-sister in Slough who has just qualified as a pilot about this too. I must come from a family of female coconut sell-outs or something. I just don’t get it. They are letting the side down, by doing well in their career, without acting like floozies by attending wine tastings and bars and other crucibles of anti Asian woman oppression like that.

If it is about women in employment at present then this also has nothing to do with the question in hand. Because if, as you suggest later in your post the cultural issues do not come into play, then this too is irrelevant, because it is strictly dealing with women already in employment. So surely those women are equal already? Or are you saying that culture DOES have a significant influence on this? So you contradict yourself immediately.

The question still remains, why do Hindu and Sikh women progress further inside the workplace than Pakistani and Bangladeshi women? Once a qualified Pakistani or Bangladeshi woman is in the workplace, what prevents them from achieving? Plus, the point of entry explanation does not really apply to Sikh women, whose ‘point of entry’ was as unskilled working class labourers from the Doaba/Jalandhar region of Punjab, which culturally and in terms of economic profile is similar to that of Pakistani migrants.

We should be asking what attitudes within the workplace affect their opporunities for progression? Should my ability to talk about Queens Park Rangers or the taste of South African wine at a social evening determine how my colleagues perceive me? What is it about informal networking and sociability that drives the business environment – and if so, why are some groups more excluded than others? Finaly – for those of us who cannot join in the drinks in the pubs after work – are we not integrating?

What is your point? That people are horrible racists and oppressors because they go to wine tastings and talk about football? This is truly reductionist reasoning, and is an attitude of failure, pre-disposed failure, blaming others for failure. But I am at a loss as to the point that you are making. What do you suggest, that the evil and wicked conventions of British business socialising and networking must change or else there will be exclusion? On so many levels, on so many assumptions, this is wrong, and little more than another excuse for failure. The fact that women from Asian backgrounds do and have succeeded at that level in and of themselves are proof of that, and I believe that this is the true reductionist argument – and that the seeds of the argument are contained in your post, when you blame others for a failure to get on in work, by typing a litany of ‘injustices’ which you have to surmount (like evil wine tasting and networking that you dont like)

So the question you believe we should be asking is about how that the entire business and professional culture should be changed to accomodate you and others. And you accuse others of reductionist thinking! Amazing.

As usual, those who fail make excuses, shift the blame, and have a losers mentality to begin with, then blame all but themselves for their failure. Toughen up, stop whining, move on.

(By the way, your representation of the British workspace is a caricature, and the example of strong, ball-busting, very successful Asian women (of all backgrounds) in the City, in business, in the professions, are living refutations of all the excuses that can be made — if they can make it so can anybody, and if you/they have to work a little harder, well, welcome to the real world — where marginal people thrive because they are forced to prove themselves and excel)

Let women be. For the sake of all our ‘survival’.

The point of research like this is that it has already taken into account cultural factors – and then dis-aggregated levels of employment and progression.

Years and years and years of research has demonstrated the same thing and here we are reducing this research to cultural constraints – blaming the practices within rather than the structural inequalities that maintain such dire statistics. The ladies in question here are precisely the ones who have broken stereotypes, acquired qualifications that are better than their white counterparts and STILL they are not progressing. This is about the lack of opporunities within the work-place – not about cultural repression. I am rather disappointed that progressive politics contributions have taken such a reductionist view of this situation. Indian women do better because frankly their entry point into the UK were earlier and they also came from more prosperous background with skills to enable them to enter the labour market with more ease. The Pakistanis – particularly the Mir Puris and most definately the Bangladeshis came from rural and less education backgrounds. These facts should speak for themselves before we start piling on the cultral explanations. I do my best to pursue my goals at work, I even build bridges so that my white colleagues can understand us and vice versa – and I am Bangladeshi, female and far more qualified than my white colleagues, and I completely agree with Jobeda Khanom’s analysis.

This research exposes the lack of progression within the workplace – the place to debate gender practices in Asian communities – while a valid topic – is irrelevant here and distracts from the issue at hand – what to do about the inequalities in progression for Pakistani and Bangladeshis women – not abou what age they marry, what their men do, how they are different from Hindu women etc. We should be asking what attitudes within the workplace affect their opporunities for progression? Should my ability to talk about Queens Park Rangers or the taste of South African wine at a social evening determine how my colleagues perceive me? What is it about informal networking and sociability that drives the business environment – and if so, why are some groups more excluded than others? Finaly – for those of us who cannot join in the drinks in the pubs after work – are we not integrating?

This research wasn’t supposed to spawn a debate on whether female employment promotes integration. No one is disputing this in the research( though plenty might be in our communities). This research puts into the frame those women who ARE ALREADY IN EMPLOYMENT and NOT MOVING ON.

Queen Bee: It is the surest route to female emancipation within Asian communities.

See, I agree with this. I was having this conversation with two women and I was saying we need to find ways to empower women such as education and employment and a better understanding of support structures (in case of abuse etc) and I got back this bizarre reply that no the problem was men who needed to be “educated”.

Now I agree that there is patriarchy that need dealing with and we have to make societies more equal. But “educating men” is, I believe, a tactic that won’t work. It is resource intensive and I don’t think the incentives are created for men to change their behaviour. It makes more sense to focus resources on empowering women. But apparently I was being patriarchal. Sheesh.

This kind of militancy I back 100%!

>>>Female employment quickens integration, improves the mental and physical health of Asian women, reduces poverty, overcrowding, leads to lower birth rates, and begins to automatically corrode male hegemonic assumptions within families. It is the surest route to female emancipation within Asian communities.

What’s often forgotten is that female employment benefits the entire community’s socio-economic profile.

Col Mustafa (good to have you back, the number of times people asked after you…)makes several very good points. It seems that while there may have been a fairly rapid change in the number of Pak/bangla women working – marriage to spouses from overseas skews the picture, and possibly, sets some families back. Like Queen Bee mentions, some of the assumptions that makes families arrange such marriages need to be challenged.

I want public policy to reflect the need for encouraging Pakistani and Bangladeshi women to work in order to offer choices to them, and so that they can follow the example of Indian women.

Female employment quickens integration, improves the mental and physical health of Asian women, reduces poverty, overcrowding, leads to lower birth rates, and begins to automatically corrode male hegemonic assumptions within families. It is the surest route to female emancipation within Asian communities.

A deeper study of the Indian experience and patterns of employment and achievement here would be instructive, how they reached the stage they are now at, almost at parity with the work patterns of white women. At the end of the day, economic necessity will liberate.

So as a matter of course, I would be opposed to any policy consideration that encouraged the entrenchment of current employment patterns amongst Pakistani and Bangladeshi women, including the idea of paying them for housework. In fact I would want government to take extra steps to set up a commission to investigate this very problem and provide strategies to be pursued to do everything possible to shatter these entrenchments. I wish it could be done with the same sanction as a report from the Equal Opportunities Commission would provide.

But as you may be aware, I would be cynical of this kind of progressive championing of Asian women’s causes to emerge, given that the need of the day is to bolster the self-esteem of male Asian identity-politicians and have tea and samosa parties for them as Rome burns and Mirpuri and Sylehti women are muffled and oppressed.

In an ideal world I would do everything possible in terms of legislation to narrow the opportunities for patriarchal paradigms to be maintained in extremity by outlawing forced marriage and seriously considering how to prevent British girls being ‘persuaded’ into marrying men from Pakistan or Bangladesh by restricting immigration flows from those countries on the basis of marriage to a British citizen, or at the very least, making such marriages less easy to process. I would even set up a task force with the aim of bringing the employment levels of Pakistani and Bangladeshi women up to the national median, I would involve all social agencies in this, I would even, if nessecary, disallow welfare payments to women who claim to be unable to work because of cultural norms of sequestration. The times call for tough love. But the tough practices of some men and their cultural sensibilities demand tough responses. We are British and the writ of British society shall be supreme for Asian women, no quarter can be given, the atavism has to be stopped and if changes cannot take place gradually through internal reform and natural liberalization then we can quicken and challenge these norms rigorously through campaigning and where necessary with government and agency support. (Although government is predictably slow in granting us what we need to empower ourselves, in some areas it has done good, in others it has been inadequate)

But then on these matters I am a militant. I have seen too much to make me soft-soap the needs of the times.

The article suggests that after asking only a 1000 women from every background that muslim Bengali/Pakistani and carribean women in general have encountered some negative vibes from certain employers even though they might of had the same qualifications or what not.

Now even in insular muslim/bengali communities i know of with my own eyes several women working.
Granted several of them are working within thier own communities; i.e social workers.
But i don’t see how thats a problem seeing as though who else is best suited to work within these communities other than people from the community.

Im not sure what people are trying to suggest here; but it seems like what im hearing is that muslim bengali/pakistani women should be making more of an effort to work in different areas.

This is a very vague article which suggests nothing to be honest apart from predicting that these 16 yr olds might grow up and not get work.
Surely it depends on what they do in thier lives, what subjects they decide to study, whether they want to study, where they study, who they meet, blah blah.

First of all the problems which we are talking about here will be more evident within insular communites.
Bengalis in Tower Hamlets/ Pakistanis in Bradford you get the point.
Now from my own knowledge, the problems in these communities are that the men are the ones that are mostly unemployed, and diverting off the whole career aspect either into crime/drugs or just plain idleness; while their sisters and wives are working.
I mean there’s even the issue of many of these women that have been married off before they finished uni to some dude from Pakistan or Bangladesh cos thier parents still believe in that kind of thing, but woman is still working while new husband is sitting at home watching trisha.

Theres a bigger problem here than what were talking about, in my opinion im very proud at the fact this new generation of muslim women are much more work and study orientated than before.

Don’t get me wrong theres still plenty of women being held back.
I mean even when youv’e got a family of 2 bros and 2 sis, mum and dad don’t work cos they cant even speak the lingo, bros are fucked on drugs and guess whose working.
That scenario is more common than you think in these communities.
And yes that factor also is holding these women back from maybe much better careers.

But again different factors are at play here, and different methods need to used to try and help the situation.
Its not like there aren’t poor white insular communties around England in which a huge drug/crime culture isn’t evident.
If anything these women that are working within such a depressive environment should be commended even more.

Also people i think we are forgetting another factor which is that women and men from Pakistan/Bangladesh are still coming here mostly through marriage and not to study or work.
So obviously the stats are going to reflect that; seeing as though alot of the women and men that coming over cannot speak english, have limited education and cannot join the workforce immediately.

Hey thanx Viks; good to see you lot too.

If you do a search on the subject you’ll be amazed.

Here is just one link –

http://www.partnershipway.org/html/subpages/articles/valueofhouseword.htm

“The economic value of housework
New survey to track women-dominated labor
By Kristen Gerencher, CBS.MarketWatch.com
Last Update: 7:00 AM ET Jan 17, 2001″

I did add ‘men’ as an afterthought, only to recognise that there is now the concept of househusbands.

A few questions, Refresh:

1. Is the work really all that “valuable” in monetary terms – would a cleaning lady/part cook/part nanny really earn all that much? Come on be honest.

2. Who do you suggest pays for these women (you added men as an afterthought methinks and are not really serious about this) who voluntarily opt to stay put at home? The government?

Raz,
The study linked above does mention that Indian muslims (no gender breakdown given) do substantially better in the employment market than Pakistanis/Bangladeshis. It is not really a religion issue, i remember reading somewhere that Iranians are one of the best paid minority groups in the UK

Sorry – I am struggling with my keyboard and my last post didn’t quite make sense to me either, esp. the crazy typos.

A while back, there was a push to recognise the monetary value to the economy of women who chose to opt out of the workplace to build and run households.

By paying women (or men) the going rate for this valuable work, we would remove some of the gender inequalities.

How could such a policy impact Asian women? And how could potential problems be overcome?