* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
On the eve of the centenary of International Women’s Day, I am in the Philippines, in Cebu city, interviewing women from a cemetery-slum. I am here on behalf of the Paris-based humanitarian NGO, Enfants d’Asie-CoA (Children of Asia), which provides comprehensive care for underprivileged children in South-East Asia and has for years been providing schooling and medical care for the children living in this cemetery-slum.
The women I am talking with—this afternoon I’m with Julie, Teresa, Vivencia, Cecilia, Ann—are some of the mothers of the children in Children of Asia’s education programme. These women were born in the cemetery over 30 years ago. Their children were born in the cemetery.
Unfortunately, today we are not discussing their children’s progress at school, but the fact that the women and their families, who have lived in this cemetery-slum for decades, have just been evicted and do not know how they are going to cope without the shelter the cemetery supplied.
Julie, Teresa, Vivencia, Celia and Ann are among the approximately 2.7 billion people in the world struggling to survive on less than 2 dollars a day—70 percent of whom are women. They tell me of their fears about coping: although it had no running water, sanitation or electricity, the cemetery was the source of their “livelihoods”, such as candle vending and cleaning the tombs.
The families were also occasionally able to obtain leftover food from funerals. The mothers share their anxiety that this uprooting might prevent their children from completing their schooling and destroy their dreams of going to college.
I ask whether any of the mothers themselves attended school and, if so, what grade they achieved. The answer is invariably the same: none of these women attended beyond elementary school—for the simple reason that their parents could not afford to send them to school and because, as young girls, they had to take care of their siblings and/or work with their parents.
The atmosphere of our conversation is surprisingly convivial—testament to how strong and generous these women are. Their resilience is awe-inspiring. And yet, seeing what they have to cope with every day, and knowing that there are countless women living in similar or significantly worse circumstances—the majority of the world’s women: women who have utterly and tragically missed out on the advances felt by other women in the 20th and 21st centuries—it’s hard to feel celebratory about International Women’s Day.
At the same time, however, it feels almost like a moral duty to be optimistic. Certainly we can and should commemorate the remarkable heroism and accomplishments of our foremothers around the world, who fought for women’s rights, for the social, political and economic freedoms and opportunities that many women today enjoy.
Because of their valiant and relentless work, women’s rights are now recognized, at least in principle, as human rights—as enshrined in the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, signed in 1995.
“We are at a unique turning point in history. Never before has there been such momentum around the issue of gender parity on the global stage”—on this upbeat note, the 2010 World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report began.
The report’s introduction cites positive developments such as the creation in 2010 of UN Women, the new U.N. entity to accelerate progress in achieving gender equality and the empowerment of women; the global “movement” to invest in girls’ education in the developing world; the recent legislation in several countries to promote women’s leadership in business and politics.
All this is true! Across the globe, there has been vocal acknowledgement that girls’ and women’s education and empowerment are key to sustainable economic and social development, and to worldwide peace and stability.
Indeed, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon declared Millennium Development Goal 3—promote gender equality and empower women—a prerequisite for the achievement of all the other MDG goals, which were eight goals set in 2000 to help alleviate poverty by 2015.
In 2010, we saw the launch of the U.N. Global Compact and UNIFEM’s Women's Empowerment Principles: Equality Means Business (WEPs), elaborating the gender dimension of good corporate citizenship, and there have been many reports demonstrating the positive correlation between gender diversity on corporate boards and business performance.
In Ban Ki Moon’s words: “Investing in women is not only the right thing to do; it is the smart thing to do.” And this is echoed in the general discourse on women’s rights. Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn’s bracing and welcome book Half the Sky was “a call to arms against our era’s most pervasive human rights violation: the oppression of women and girls in the developing world”, and made women’s rights and women’s issues front page international news.
As the authors emphasized: “If the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense, the opportunity they represent is even greater”.
The publication of Half the Sky heralded the launch of the The Female Factor by the International Herald Tribune, with multiple issues relating to women’s rights and women’s empowerment around the world making news headlines on a quasi-daily basis.
In Europe, my female peers and I know that we’re outnumbering men in the labour market and our purchasing decisions rule. It might seem that we’re on the final sprint to parity paradise. But it’s not so.
In “The True Paradox”, an article about women in France, The Female Factor sums up the situation for women across the developed world today: “They have more say over their sexuality and birth control, they have overtaken men in education and are catching up in the labour market, but few make it to the top layer of corporate, economic and political leadership.”
The enthusiasm-tempering epigraph of the 2011 UK government report Women on Boards observes: “at the current rate of change, it will take over 70 years to achieve gender-balanced boardrooms in the UK”. And the Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2010 Women’s Economic Opportunity report states: “after a century of impressive progress, overall economic opportunities for women still lag behind those of men.
Women, on average, earn 75 percent of their male co-workers’ wages, and the difference cannot be explained solely by schooling or experience”. In parliament, women are still outnumbered 4 to 1 and, at the current rate, it will be another four decades before gender parity is achieved in that arena.
So, while the discourse on gender equality and women’s empowerment may be vibrant and inspiring, in practice progress is dishearteningly slow. And, when it comes to less privileged and more vulnerable women than myself, the cost of not acting swiftly enough is painfully high: countless women around the world have their rights denied, are prevented from achieving their potential, and find their lives endangered.
Today, around the world, women are suffering the fallout from the economic crisis which adversely affected hunger levels, child and maternal health, gender equality, access to clean water and disease control.
The facts are: of the approximately 1.3 billion people living in grinding poverty, 70 percent are women; of the nearly one billion people who are illiterate, two thirds are women; it is estimated that one woman dies each minute of every day and night as a result of problems in pregnancy and childbirth, mostly in the global South, and the vast majority of these deaths are preventable; violence against women is a global pandemic—globally, up to six out of every ten women experience physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime.
In light of the ongoing pandemic of violence against women, the U.N. has taken several crucial initiatives in past years. 2008 saw the launch of the U.N. Secretary-General’s Unite to End Violence Against Women Campaign, intended to make ending violence against women a top priority for governments everywhere.
In the same year, Security Council resolution 1820 became the first resolution to recognize conflict-related sexual violence as a matter of international peace and security. Last year saw the creation of UN Women, the new U.N. entity to advance women’s rights.
And in early 2010, the U.N. created the position of Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, appointing Margot Wallström to step up efforts to end conflict-related sexual violence against women and children. These initiatives are desperately welcome. As Margot Wallström says: "Violence against women is the most common but least punished crime in the world."
Last month’s conviction of a high-ranking commander and several other army personnel by a military court in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) was unprecedented. The commander was found guilty of crimes against humanity following the mass rapes committed by troops under his command.
As Wallström said: "The sentences send a strong signal to all perpetrators in the DRC and beyond that conflict-related sexual violence is not acceptable and will not be tolerated. It also shows that accountability for sexual violence is possible."
This is crucial progress. But one cannot help but see the glass as half empty. In Congo alone, 2009 estimates of the number of rapes of girls and women, aged between 3 and 60, vary between 15,000 and 40,000. Most of those surviving these unspeakable attacks—which often involve mutilation—are children, mainly girls.
Furthermore, violence against women is not confined to developing countries and contexts of conflict: it occurs every day, everywhere in the world. The girls and women who constitute these unimaginable gender-based violence statistics are daughters, mothers, sisters, aunts, wives.
It’s simply not acceptable that UN Women is already suffering a massive funding shortfall, with fears that the entity is slated to fail before it has really come into being. Moreover, the recent Oxfam and VSO UK Blueprint for U.N. Women Survey revealed that while the U.N. has until now largely focused on safeguarding women’s rights during wartime, women at a the grassroots level in fact believe that "the root cause of the problem is not sporadic conflict, but a constant state of systematic inequality and violence."
One cannot help but speculate that if women were not still outnumbered 4 to 1 in legislatures around the world, these issues would be addressed with the urgency they require. As Margot Wallström remarked, when confronting the difficulty of bridging the chasm between security policy and women’s reality: "the missing link is women's participation and leadership."
The problem is one that transcends age, race, culture, wealth and geography—even, in a sense, gender. We all—men and women alike—share a common, imperative need to create the conditions whereby women everywhere can be safe and can exercise their rights.
Women and men everywhere, from the grassroots to the international level, must work together to put an end to violations of women’s human rights and improve the global status of women, ensuring that women’s legal rights can be exercised in practice.
We need to hold accountable governments that fail to ensure this. We need to intensify efforts to protect women’s rights and empower girls and women through practical steps, such as education, inclusive finance, and smart schemes in business to foster women’s leadership.
On International Women’s Day, let’s not forget men. Men, by definition, have a vital role to play alongside women: men have been involved in, and need to be more involved in, initiatives to combat violence against women; men have championed, and need to continue to champion, gender equality—from the board room to the cabinet office; and men and women need to continue to work together everywhere to advance education and inclusive finance initiatives to enhance everyone’s life prospects. It’s only together that women, men, their children and societies, can genuinely thrive.
World Bank Global Monitoring Report 2010: The MDGs after the Crisis.
