Better less cultured but more maternal? So it would seem, or at least and how much the highest offices of the Hungarian government would support in a report that has sparked a whirlwind of controversy and perplexity. The reason? The phenomenon ofpink education that favors women in Hungary it could endanger the economy, lower the birth rate and disadvantage men. This is in fact the complaint contained in a report drawn up by a parliament watchdog and considered close to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, writes the Guardian online. According to the authors of the paper, women are overrepresented in Hungarian higher education and warn that an increase in female graduates could make women less likely to marry and have children.
The report
Orbán tried to raise the rate birth rate of Hungary which is declining. In 2019 it announced that women with four children will be exempt from paying income tax for life. The document claims that over the past decade more women than men have enrolled in Hungarian universities, with a percentage this fall standing at 54.5%.
Meanwhile, male students have dropped out of college at a higher rate. Not only. According to the report, “female traits” such as emotional and social maturity are favored in the Hungarian education system, which means that sexual equality would be “significantly weakened”. The researchers therefore warned that the Hungarian economy could be put at risk if “male traits”, listed as technical skills, risk-taking and entrepreneurship, were underestimated.
The report, drawn up by the State Auditors’ Office, was released last month, but the findings have now been published in the Nepszava newspaper, prompting harsh criticism from several Hungarian politicians and human rights experts. Hungary has long been criticized for its gender inequalities. After a visit in 2019, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatoviche said that “the country is retreating in terms of gender equality and women’s rights”.
A gender issue in a sovereign version, then. Viktor Orban’s state control body in Hungary has opened up the new education front, denouncing that it is becoming “too feminine”.
The alarm
The fact that triggered the alarm is probably what 54.5 percent of the freshmen in the country’s universities this fall will be women. The report – released last month, but remained undetected until the newspaper Nepsava has given the news – denounces the risk posed by this presumed trend on the development of young people and consequent demographic problems. “The phenomenon of education in pink has multiple economic and social consequences”, reads the text developed by the State verification body considered very close to the premier. In Hungary, the teaching staff is dominated by women, as in many other countries. 82 percent of teachers are women, it is stressed.
The reactions
“The Orbán model, which inspires the right, wants women at home without education. The birth rate is not fought like this but by building a society made for women and men. On September 25, choose who fights against gender inequalities and for the right to education ”. This is the comment of the president of the senators of the Democratic Party Simona Malpezziwho posted on Twitter an article referring to a report on women graduates in Hungary who would worry the government of Budapest because of the effects on the birth rate.
The opposition deputy Endre Tóth wrote on Facebook that talking about male and female attitudes “is total scientific nonsense”.
Salvini’s words about the Orbán family
In 2019 Orbán launched a plan to try to raise the declining birth rate. Among other things, due to emigration, the Hungarian population could go from 9.8 million to 8.3 million by 2050. Among the measures approved: thelifetime income tax exemption for all women who give birth and care for at least 4 children. Matteo Salvini has repeatedly affirmed that he has as a model for policies on family and birth rates what was put in place by the Hungarian government of Viktor Orbán. According to League captain the most advanced European law in terms of family rights is the Hungarian one. To generate this praise there would be the numerous economic incentives that the government of Budapest would make available: from the reduced tax burden for mothers of three children (zeroed if the offspring is four), to parental leave extended also to grandparents, to policies to support domestic births.
The deputy Dem Debora Serracchiani
The image of society and family that Orban and Salvini would do nothing else, for the deputy Dem Debora Serracchianithan to turn back the hands of history, re-proposing that patriarchal and retrograde model of human communities that women and minorities fought strenuously during the course of the second post-war period.
Hungarian subsidies and aid would only “gently push” women to accept the traditional role assigned to them: having children and looking after the domestic context, in defiance of any aspiration to self-determination or free choice of one’s place in society.
Nothing but wife and mother therefore: as indeed also testified by the low-interest loans for women who marry before the age of 40, a resource aimed at stimulating women to become fully active in the social (or procreative) fabric, given that for Orbán the two things seem to coincide for the female gender) before they are useless.
The opponents
Finally, the opponents of the Salvinian eulogy underline how the incentives are aimed at a single type of family, while any other form of love and care is denied and branded as subversive, as shown by the stringent laws against “LGBTQIA + propaganda”Launched by the Hungarian president himself.
Hungary has long been criticized for its gender inequalities. After a visit in 2019, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatovic, said the country is falling back on gender equality and women’s rights. But for the Hungarian auditors, on the contrary, it is the males who are discriminated against.