Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum Special Report Gender and Constitutional Issues 25 women is assaulted while pregnant. 17 From the report of her address, it is unclear from which country these figures come, but from the context they seem to refer to Zimbabwean women. Certainly the Musasa Project deals primarily with domestic violence affecting women in Zimbabwe. In 2000, the Law Development Commission (for which Justice Gwaunza now works), drafted the Domestic Violence Bill. Its committee consulted with women’s organisations at various stages of the drafting process. The final, wide-ranging bill has not yet come before Parliament, but it seeks to protect both parties to all types of relationship, not just those legally married, from a wide range of physical, psychological and economic abuse. If passed into law, the Domestic Violence Bill will enact one intent of the rejected 1999 Draft Constitution (s 39(a)), to protect everyone’s right ‘to be free from all forms of violence from both public and private sources’. 18 Gender discrimination in employment CEDAW is particularly concerned that women should have equal opportunities with men in all forms of income generation, including employment. Historically, in most societies, women have suffered rampant discrimination by employers, except in times of war, when male workers are called up into armies and women are mobilised temporarily to replace them as producers. Discrimination against women as employees is often based as much on sex as gender. Because women take work-time off to have babies and feed them, some employers argue that their productivity and reliability are both lower than those of men. Women, this argument goes, put their children before their work responsibilities. They are therefore more expensive employees than men. It is true that the records of many workplaces show that women with children are absent from work more frequently than other categories of worker. Breast-feeding mothers do have legal entitlements to feed their infants during work hours. However, women may also be regarded as more responsible workers than men. Men’s productivity regularly falls on Friday afternoons and Monday mornings as they anticipate and then recover from weekends. Women may take more time off to attend to children, but they work harder and more effectively while at work. For some managers, therefore, these inefficiencies of male and female workers cancel each other out, leaving nothing really to choose between the sexes in respect of their overall productivity. But managers can only come to this conclusion if they have employed both women and men, and noted their experience. If they simply believe, in line with gender stereotypes and without examining the evidence, that men make ‘better’ employees, they will continue to discriminate against women in employment. The figures suggest that the majority of Zimbabwean employers do just that. In 1999, women comprised only some 18% of all formally-employed workers. As the table below shows, wide variations between sectors were hidden in this average figure, with health and education (nurses and teachers) accounting for the lion’s share. health 57.2 education 33.9 finance 31.2 private sector 26.3 agriculture 26.0 distribution 15.0 services 14.5 public administration 10.2 other sectors less than 10.0 overall 18.0 Despite its public commitment of some years’ standing to employ women in at least 30% of all managerial positions in the public service, Government has failed to achieve this target. In 1999 only two women were among 23 permanent secretaries to ministries in the civil service. In the judiciary, only six of 17 Sunday Mail 8 April 2001. 18 This intent rings very hollow against the deliberate and orchestrated public political violence to which so many Zimbabweans have been subjected since rejecting the Draft Constitution and electing 58 parliamentarians from opposition parties four months later. 16