A memo allowing all female civil servants in The Gambia to leave work two hours early during Ramadan has been criticised as sexist.
From Monday to Thursday they could leave at 14:00 local time – and at 12:30 on Fridays as usual, the authorities said earlier this week at the start of the Muslim holy fasting month.
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“This is to allow female staff to attend to their traditional evening ‘iftar’ preparations ahead of the breaking of the fast,” the statement noted.
But gender rights activist Fatou Baldeh says the initiative is a way of confining “women to the kitchen, while men work in the office”.
“When you say women to go home early, we as Gambian women know what that means,” she told the BBC’s Focus on Africa radio programme.
“It means go home and prepare food for breaking the fast, so go home and prepare food for your husband, for your family.
“If this statement was given to everyone, if they said all civil servants can go home at two o’clock that’s a different thing.”
And the fact that it had come from a government institution in the mainly Muslim West Africa country was worrying, she said.
“We are seeing institutionalised sexism, institutionalised structures that are holding women back.”
