Women's Day

Last Thursday, March 8, was Women’s Day (Эмэгтэйчүүдийн Баярын Өдөр) in Mongolia. As could be expected it was celebrated with lots of food and vodka and dancing teachers. Dancing teachers in themselves are worthy of a blog post. Never since I came here have I wished I had a video camera as much as when I saw a bunch of middle-aged Mongolians in suits raving to a techno version of the Für Elise. However I’d like to take this opportunity though to point out why we should celebrate Mongolian women, because it is women who run the country. Women here are teachers, governors, doctors, lawyers, business owners - in fact, they are overrepresented in nearly every profession. Why is this?

Part of the reason has to do with Mongolia’s traditional economy. Until recently in history, almost everyone in the country herded animals or was a Buddhist monk. Both boys and girls do work in herding families, but the boys’ role is greater. When the Socialists dumped a national education system on Mongolia, most families figured that if there were going to educate one of their kids, they would send the daughter, and keep the son home to do manly ranch work. So more women finished school, more women went to college, and more women got jobs. When the professional sector appeared, it was filled with women. A substantial part of the population is still involved in herding, so the trend continues.

The gap begins early. In  my upper grade classes, there are always more girls than boys. One class has 6 boys and 19 girls. Mongolians aren’t giving birth to girls at a 4:1 ratio over boys. The boys are dropping out of school.

My school has 36 faculty (at least on the contact info sheet). 8 of them (including me) are men. The other 28 are women. That means they outnumber us almost 4 to 1. Moreover, the really powerful positions are all women. The school director (principal / superintendent) is a woman, as are both of the training managers (the teachers’ immediate bosses, who oversee them and approve all lesson plans). Our past few directors and training managers were also women. Of 4 doctors I’ve met, 3 are women. Our soum governor is a woman. Men are shepherds, drivers, handymen, watchmen, miners, welders, stokers, etc. - mostly shepherds. Or they’re unemployed. Only when you get to the very top (parliamentary representatives, for example) do men dominate again.

One consequence of this is relationships in Mongolia are very mismatched status-wise. In most countries people marry people of equivalent education and income. If they don’t, it’s usually the man who’s higher status. In Mongolia it’s very much the opposite. Women are usually better-educated and make more money than their husbands. Of the male teachers I mentioned above, 4 are married to other teachers, 1 is dating another teacher, 1 is dating a student (a UNIVERSITY student, if you were wondering), and 1 is married to the governor (even the governor can’t resist a sexy teacher). Obviously 23 of the women are going to be unable to marry another teacher. One is married to a bank clerk and the rest that I know about are married to herders, drivers, and school workers (not teachers). One of our teachers, who went to the National University of Mongolia (the top school in the country), is married to one of the men who, if I recall correctly, maintains the furnace at school, and who presumably never went to college. In the US it would be really bizarre for an Ivy League graduate to marry a guy without any college education. But it happens in Mongolia.

Nevertheless, everybody is married. Why aren’t there instead a bunch of lonely old teachers dreaming of an equitable match? Because in Mongolia everyone wants you to get married, now. People here (in the countryside) tend to marry by their early twenties, marry the first person they date, and marry quickly (i.e., we’ve been dating for 4 months, let’s get married). Ironically, this is fueled by the lack of educated men, because everyone is in a hurry to put a lock on the first decent man they meet. It’s like an arms race, except instead of being the first person to detonate a nuclear weapon, you must be the first person to marry that guy who just came back from the city with a degree. If you can’t, you find a nice guy among the herdsmen, lest you end up with an unemployed alcoholic (which are unfortunately common in many places).

Of all those 36 teachers, only 2 are neither married nor engaged: myself and one 26-year-old woman. Unsurprisingly, a few teachers have begun to ask if I would marry her. They could be joking, but I’m not sure. What sane woman, already past her early twenties, would not jump at the golden opportunity of a man with a degree and job being dumped right next to her? (In any case, she herself has shown no interest in me.)

So let’s celebrate women and all the hard work they do, and hope more men get their act together!