2023
Despite gender equality being embedded in Seychelles’ constitution, striving to provide equal opportunities for both men and women throughout its different sectors remains a challenge. To provide and extract more value from the country’s workforce, it is important to understand the impacts of gender on Seychellois when accessing work opportunities, upskilling, and delivering optimal performance.
Through surveys participated by 22 organizations and establishments, this study focused on capturing the gender landscape across 4 main sectors of the blue economy, namely, Marine Security, Maritime/Coastal Tourism, Development/Shipping, and Education/Training. In doing so, the study aims to inform policy and engage stakeholders and the broader community to create a gender-equal environment for the Seychellois.
The results revealed that Seychelles’ workforce consists of roughly 64% men and 36% women. Furthermore, more women (31%) landed managerial positions than men (21%). The majority of the respondents also completed at least their secondary education, with women being 1.3 times more likely to finish their university degrees than their male counterparts. Slightly more women (56%) also completed post-secondary studies than men (52%).
However, there’s more to these numbers, as when diving into salary brackets, men still got paid higher than women overall. These layered findings require more thorough research to understand how wage disparity makes its way into the workforce. Among the main hypotheses were that women eventually leave the workforce to care for their families or that their careers are put to a halt during pregnancy.
Even without explicit institutional barriers, cultural norms also remain to weigh heavily on men and women, as they bear the stigma associated with their respective genders. For instance, women pursuing careers in Maritime/Coast Tourism report facing discrimination, while men suffer from negative stereotypes such as laziness and lacking motivation in schools, reportedly leading to poorer academic performance. Men also reported feeling marginalized and are allegedly facing substance and drug abuse problems as a result of difficulty in adjusting to changing gender norms. On the other hand, 4 in 10 women suffer from domestic abuse by their intimate partners, leading to the portrayal of men Seychellois as irresponsible fathers, further reinforcing media stereotypes.
More than decisively dismantling institutional barriers, these study’s findings reveal that embedding gender equality also requires cultural work. Deeply seated gender norms continue to affect both men and women and it is necessary to develop strategies to address issues such as pay gaps, domestic violence, and substance abuse. Otherwise, no legal provisions would suffice in putting out the self-feeding fires that gender norms pass onto the Seychellois, from one generation to another.