Perspective

Last weekend I attended a fundraising lunch organised by our Zonta group. One of the attendees was a woman from Afghanistan. She and another woman have been sponsored to come to Australia for a year to do law studies. I didn't get all the details of her story but here is the overview. She has an undergraduate degree finished when she was 22 (she is now 32), but due to conditions, eg. the Taliban, fighting etc, she hasn't worked since then, because she is a woman. She is from Kabul, and sometimes her family would go to the provinces to get away from fighting, but now the provinces are too dangerous. There is a big atmosphere of fear. As a single woman it is hard for her to leave her family, even to come to Australia. Many other young women, who may have mean eligible to make the trip were scared (or their families were scared for them). Even now, being here and seeing how nice Australians are, it is still hard, with English as her second language and being the first time she has lived by herself.

I've been going through phases of feeling sorry for myself, as I am having difficulty finding work that I enjoy, and wondering where my life is headed (and having a birthday today is also a reason for introspection), but hearing a story like that really makes me realize how relatively well off I am. I'm well educated, have worked here and overseas, and have the freedom to live independently. That's not to say there aren't still issues about women's equality in this country. I had been dealing with a recruiter who told me he had a client company he felt my background and skills would be perfect for. The feedback from the company was that they didn't even want to interview me because I was a woman and they didn't think any woman would be capable of fitting into their organisation. This is despite the fact that because I have an engineering degree every job I have ever had has been male dominated. I'm well past the stage of feeling I have to prove a point, so I wouldn't want to work for a company that feels like that. The thing that most astonishes me is not that some men still feel like that, but that they feel comfortable enough to say it out loud. Have they been living under a rock while all sorts of legislation about equal opportunity have come in? Of course now with the new IR laws sexism can be excused as just a 'personality conflict'.

Anyway enough of the bad stuff. Its my birthday (yay!) and my parents have sent me some money so I have to think about how to spend it. Also congratulations to Meg for finally finishing her boyfriend-curse-busting sweater. I witnessed the final knitted stitches last weekend, so its great to see the photos of the finished product being modelled.