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My eyes widened as I read the initial title of this week’s careers pages The role of women in the dairy industry, written by our dairy editor, Aidan Brennan. I wasn’t exactly sure why it didn’t sit right with me, but we changed the title nonetheless, just enough, to shift the tone. It was the word “role” that stuck in my craw.
Am I so afraid to offend people’s oft-easily offended sensibilities?
On a second read, I questioned if my initial response was over the top? It’s a great read in support of the important role played by women on dairy farms across Europe. Am I so afraid to offend people’s oft-easily offended sensibilities? How often do we temper our language to avoid offence and the risk of insult?
The role issue raised its head again on New Year’s Day, when I watched the movie Mulan with my girls. It was the live-action Disney remake about the famed Chinese female warrior. Aside from the controversies surrounding the movie itself, I ran a slight blank in answering the questions posed by Raine and Dia about the heroine’s role in her world.
“Why is she pretending to be a boy?” My response: “Because she was not allowed to join the army.”
“Why?” the retort, “because she is a girl?”
“Why does that matter?”
“Girls were not allowed join the army.”
“Why?”
“Because that was the way it was back then.”
“But they can now?” I was stumped.
I was not able to give my girls a confident “yes” in relation to a point on equality
I wasn’t sure! In this day and age, I was not able to give my girls a confident “yes” in relation to a point on equality. I Googled it – they can, but they make up less than 5% so you would not exactly call it “active recruitment”.
My two girls will grow up in a different world to the one I grew up in. And this will be nothing resembling what their grandmothers or, even less so, what their great grandmothers grew up in. I wondered if I was doing them a disservice showing them a movie where a woman was encouraged to know her place or “role”, despite the Disney-style ending. Currently my girls have no comprehension of what “roles” women played in the past or what political, religious, or traditional ideals condemned them to those roles. And I hope they will never ever experience it to the extent that previous generations did. If they say they want to be this, or that, or marry this girl or that boy, I expect that they will meet little opposition. They owe this to the women who rejected the roles they were assigned over the last century.
However, as my faltering uncertainty demonstrated, we are not there yet. The sad reality is that there are still many women stuck in “roles” from which they cannot escape. They write to us. It is important for our young women to know that they do not have to accept a role they do not choose for themselves.
She advised that clearly defined roles are required to make a family business work, with everyone working to their strengths
Speaking of strong women, in the second of our “Making our Family Farms work” series I met with Caitriona and Robert Cullen from Cullen nurseries. Caitriona quit her secure job to invest more time in her family but found over the course of the pandemic that her skillset could play an important role in the growth of their nursery business. She advised that clearly defined roles are required to make a family business work, with everyone working to their strengths. When your role is central and appreciated – which is what Aidan is pointing out in terms of women in the dairy industry – that role is indeed powerful.
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