Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by this author are their own and do not represent the official position of the Barbados Today Inc.
This week I want to do a rapid fire through some issues that appeared in the news cycle. First, I was very disappointed with the Minister Delma Thomas of Grenada. She was quoted in a section of the Barbadian media recently lamenting that Grenadian women were making false reports of domestic violence to get state assistance.
I have not seen a retraction of the story. The comment was an unfortunate one, both in its content and timing. The international ratio for false reporting of instances of domestic abuse is about two per cent. There is no evidence – anecdotal or statistical – to show that Grenada or the Commonwealth Caribbean is outside of the international ratio.
So what Minister Thomas did was to use one case, which is well within the two per cent norm, to categorize the women of Grenada and the wider Caribbean in a way that there is no evidence to support. Beyond that, Minister Thomas made herself seem not seized. It is her country which is responsible for a piece of groundbreaking research on the prevalence of intimate partner violence only last month!
The study revealed that domestic violence is real in the lives of Grenadian women. Some of the highlights of the UN/Caribbean Development Bank sanctioned report were that one in every four Grenadian women was affected by physical violence. Close to one in every ten experienced sexual violence and one in 20 reported economic violence.
Given these statistics, it is interesting that the Minister opted to focus on one instance of misreporting than to use the media time to lay down her forward strategy in addressing the needs of women affected by domestic violence in Grenada.
It was with more pleasure that I noted that Barbados was moving toward Republic status. Rituals and naming are important parts of human existence. Fifty-five years later is an apt time in Barbados’ self-determination project for a total split with the ceremonial vestiges of an English Head of State.
This split leaves room for the furtherance of a Barbadian standard to replace those to which we have been tied. Some of those standards have kept a deep self-hatred in us. Perhaps this signals more room for our hair, our language and ways of measuring things such as educational aptitude that are not archaic and colonial in origin. Time alone will tell as we build out a republic road map.
Hotelier Paul Doyle spent some time this week defending his decision, with thousands of tourism related staff on furlough, to apply for a work permit to fill the post of Director of Finance. In my humble opinion, Mr Doyle’s explanation did not help his cause. He insisted that he could not find a person with the experience needed from the local pool talent to fill the job. He spoke of needing someone who knew the technology the company employed and who can manage staff as well.
Perhaps Mr Doyle feels he cannot find the talent he needs because he has not spent the time required to adequately refine the role of the person he is seeking to recruit. To my mind, at the level of Director, the focus is on an individual who can set the pace of the Department they run in terms of vision and course. While the individual will need a broad understanding of the technology used to keep records and report – which they will most likely have from having climbed the corporate ladder – being a director is less about the delivery of the reports and more about the analysis and action needed to operationalize the reports.
Another pet peeve of mine is that Barbadian employers continue to believe that recruiting is about finding a person with seamlessly matched skills. This is far from how recruiting works. All jobs have nuances and those cannot be taught or learnt in another environment. Recruiting is about hiring the talent who has the ability through training and experience to adapt to the nuances of a workplace.
So if my current workplace uses slow books and the new company uses medium books, that is immaterial in recruiting. What would be useful is that the candidate has a demonstrated ability to have worked in at least two environments and shifted technology at a level which did not affect performance.
If Barbados still does not have the talent for a director of finance after all these years of making tourism its primary economic endeavour, it is because we have allowed hotels to maintain a white top tier of expatriate management. We will not get past that until the Immigration Department stops its complicity in granting work permits which cannot be reasonably justified. Â Â
Marsha Hinds is the President of the National Organisation of Women
