Sons versus Daughters

In the fitness club I have joined for about one year, there are two women attract my attention recently. One has a daughter, fifteen years old; her husband passed away around two years ago; she is unemployed, surviving by using the money her late husband left. She said that sometimes she gets some financial aid from her own family members, but not from her late husband’s family members. The other one has a son, ten years old, her husband passed away around a year ago. She works as an aerobics instructor, and she said that she monthly gets some financial aid from her family members, especially from the late husband’s family.

If I relate these two cases with the gender perspective, I think that people still think that sons/boys always deserve to get better treatment than daughters/girls. Among low-income family, when they have financial constraint for education, they always have tendency to send their sons to go to school more than the daughters. They still believe that sons later will be the breadwinner so that they need the education better than the daughters. When talking about the nutrition, parents tend to give more nutritious food to sons rather than to girls. The fact Indonesia ratified CEDAW (The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women) in 1984, and CRC (The Convention on the Rights of the Child) in 2002 doesn’t change a lot of discrimination done to daughters/girls in Indonesia. I still find many discriminative treatments toward daughters around me. Jurnal Perempuan (Women’s Journal) no 45 published in January 2006 informed that until now CEDAW is still only an alien; not many people know about it yet. It means that people—here especially women—have to work hard to socialize this convention to society so that in the future hopefully we can reduce discriminative treatments toward women.

PT56 13.30 150107