This panel brings together women's experiences from oustide the United States and focuses on gendered care work in churches, including the local independent church in Africa and the Catholic Church globally. Churches are often guilty of persisting feminization of poverty, legitimizing it with religious rationale. HIV and AIDS, Covid-19, and Ebola have exposed the magnitude of care-related tasks that women undertake, especially in the African context. The International Survey of Catholic Women(ISCW), the largest international survey of Catholic women ever carried out, further proves that although it is widely acknowledged that women carry out the bulk of labour in Catholic parishes and organizations, their labour is not only undervalued, but some even experience workplace harassment. The lived experiences of women in religion are shared but also different. This panel considers the context of postcoloniality in which various subaltern voices in religion are often muted or distorted. In arguing for postcolonial ethics that is attentive to these voices, a minor and dissident ethics is suggested that opens up a zone or area of uncertainty in times of crisis, including the crisis of colonial encounter.
HIV and AIDS, Covid-19, and Ebola have exposed the magnitude of care-related tasks on women. Most often, because of the gendered nature of domestic and reproductive roles, women are expected to assume unpaid care-related, nurturing, and domestic work. Despite the valuable duties, women are economically poor and othered. These unpaid care duties are exacerbated by pandemics and ratified even further by religion. In Nomiya Church, the first African independent church in Kenya, women's experience narratives and biblical texts such as the story of the Proverbs 31 virtuous woman are used to glorify unpaid charitable work for women. Women's virtuous personality, hard work, and character are upheld in Christian spaces, thus obstructing sound work theologies. This paper will employ African Women's theological lens in view of pointing out repressing and transformative tenets in charitable theologies of work for social and gender justice.
The faith participation of Catholic women is under-researched. In particular, there are few global studies that examine the lived experiences of women employed in Catholic parishes and organisations. The recent International Survey of Catholic Women (ISCW) provides a powerful insight into the complex diversity and shared concerns of Catholic women around the world. Distributed widely in 8 languages, it gathered 17,200 responses from women in 104 countries, making it the largest international survey of Catholic women ever carried out. This paper will report on in-depth analysis carried out on responses to open-text survey questions. It will reveal that although it is widely acknowledged that women carry out the bulk of labour in Catholic parishes and organisations, their labour is undervalued. Indeed, many ISCW respondents reported poor recognition of their labour and qualifications with little or no pay for skilled work; some respondents disclosed experiences of workplace harassment.