This week Prime Minister Robert Abela stated that the small number of women involved in politics was unacceptable and, while I agree wholeheartedly with him, what I did find interesting was how very few people spoke about or shared articles pertaining to this subject.

The few comments mostly made by men made for an enlightening read: apparently, all that is needed to even the playing field is education.

I want to tell you a story. A story of a woman who was married and had her first child by the time she was 24. This woman’s husband had to study abroad so she left her job and went with him. For more than a decade, it would have been impossible for her to get a job because she was too busy raising a family and moving from place to place every year to further her husband’s career. Her husband worked long hours too, so she decided it was better to stay at home till the children grew up.

It wasn’t because she wasn’t ambitious, it wasn’t because she wanted to spend all her days ferrying screaming children from one place to another. It was because she felt there was no choice. This story was not the exception: as little as 20 or 30 years ago, it was the rule.

We need partners who respect us enough to strive for true equality and show it not just in word but in deed

We can keep asking our women why they don’t get involved in politics or become doctors and scientists, yet no one seems to want to address the big, pink elephant in the room: people are not truly willing to support women to achieve their goals.

Even though most women now work as many hours as their husbands or partners, many are still doing the lion’s share of the chores. It’s all there in the statistics but even a quick coffee with some (though not all) of my friends tells me exactly why more and more women are opting to stick to having one child.

My mother often jokes about how my dad would wake up when his pager went off but would sleep through my petulant screams, but I know people whose partners actually sleep in a separate room so that they can get a good night’s rest while the mother has to get up every half an hour to tend to their child and still go to work in the morning.

Many might argue that if you really want to, you can always make it work, but few are willing to address the many internal and external pressures a woman faces both from her family as well as from society to be the picture perfect wife, mother and career woman.

To add insult to injury, the pay gap in Malta between men and women has gone up from five per cent in 2009 to 12 per cent in 2019. This in a country where more women than men are graduating from university every year. And yet, there are still some men blaming the free education that both sexes get from the age of five for the lack of female presence in the workplace. Don’t make me laugh.

We don’t need some form of special education (though a better system would be nice): we need partners who respect us enough to strive for true equality and show it not just in word but in deed.

We need men who don’t make us choose between having a family and having a career because they refuse to break away from stereotypes which are doing little except increasing the number of divorces and separations filed for by exhausted women. Why is it that it’s almost only ever women and gay men sharing posts about domestic violence? Why is it only ever women talking in forums about their baby’s rashes? Why are women’s issues perpetually treated as secondary and less important?

If you ask me, the fact that I’m still having to write this in 2020, is what is truly unacceptable, Dr Abela.