Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum Special Report Gender and Constitutional Issues prominence while enunciating culturally-acceptable views on the proper role of women. There is, for example, a wide discrepancy between views attributed to Minister Mujuru as a young fighter in the Mocambican camps, and her later views which seem to advocate working within, rather than confronting, patriarchal relationships and gender inequities. After Independence she dropped her Chimurenga name of Teurai Ropa (meaning ‘spill blood’) and reverted to her given name, Joyce. Gender Policy Zimbabwe has long lacked a gender policy, even though it sent delegations to the Nairobi and Beijing conferences and is a signatory to several international conventions on gender, including the Beijing Platform for Action and the 1997 Southern African Development Community Declaration on Gender and Development. The SADC Declaration commits member States to appointing women to at least 30% of decision-making posts in politics and the public service by 2005. However, Zimbabwe has thus far shown extremely limited State budgetary and staffing commitment to achieving gender equity and integrating women into all of its development programmes. Both the 30% target and the Government’s slowness in working toward it have been severely criticised by Zimbabwe’s women’s movement, which feels that 52% of the population should be entitled to 52% of these posts. Until mid-2000, for nearly four years ministerial responsibility for gender issues had been split between the President’s Office and the former Ministry for National Affairs, Employment Creation and Cooperatives. This ministry ranked the promotion of gender equality eighth of its eleven objectives. When the new cabinet was announced, this competitive duplication of functions was collapsed into the renamed Ministry for Youth Development, Gender and Employment Creation, under a male minister. Its ability to expand its gender portfolio was not enhanced by the withdrawal of donor funding for specific programmes, nor by increased staff. The first political party to give gender relations a reasonably prominent place in its policy profile was ZANU (the precursor of Zanu-PF). Its 1980 election manifesto listed 13 Fundamental Rights and Freedoms. Ranked at number eight was the right of women to equality with men ‘in all spheres of political, economic, cultural and family life’, based on the principles of equal pay for equal work and free choice of partner for both parties to a marriage (ZANU 1980:16). In government, ZANU indeed delivered formal gender equality before the law, fairly quickly. In 1982, the Legal Age of Majority Act (LAMA) gave persons of both sexes full legal capacity on reaching 18 years of age.4 LAMA gave women the right to own property as well as control over their own sexuality by vesting in each woman (rather than, as previously, in her legal guardian) the capacity to sue for seduction damages. It was followed by a flurry of statutes (the Matrimonial Causes Act, the Maintenance Act, the Taxation Amendment Act). These recognised women’s property rights on the dissolution of marriage, their right to maintenance for themselves as well as their children, and their status as individual taxpayers in their own right, if working. The tax issue was important for women. Women generally earn less than men, even when they do the same jobs. In the old tax system, the State recognised the male head of each married household as a ‘family taxpayer’. The earnings of ‘family taxpayers’ were taxed as ‘primary’ income in the lower bands. The ‘secondary’ income of their wives was taxed at higher rates. Yet any tax refund was directed to the ‘family taxpayer’. So wives, who generally earned less than their husbands, were taxed at higher rates but never themselves received refunds on their own tax paid. Their earned incomes were significantly reduced by this gender-discriminatory taxation. Where a married man and a married woman earned identical salaries, their after-tax incomes could differ by as much as 25%. In discriminating against married women, this tax policy actually discouraged women (and to a lesser extent men) from marrying. A man and a woman living together retained more of their income after paying tax than if they were married, and it was equitably distributed in accordance with their respective earnings. So the 1985 4 However, as Cheater (1993:110) has noted, there was ‘deliberate intent to mislead’ in the publicity given to this act immediately after it was passed, with the Zanu-PF Women’s League being told, in Shona, that it would involve no change in parental control of daughters’ sexuality. 5