From: "Wahome, Kimamo" <WAHOMEK@uwec.edu> Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:27:00 -0600 Subject: 2009 Global Gender Report Message-ID: <E3F0E607B3CF71418CE725F002B5F6047D10693A3F@CHERRYPEPSI.uwec.edu>
PS. The full rankings + country reports can be found at the following link:
http://www.weforum.org/en/Communities/Women%20Leaders%20and%20Gender%20Pari
ty/GenderGapNetwork/index.htm
The US is ranked #31.
Good day,
Kimamo
Global Women: Good News, Bad News
________________________________
By Katha Pollitt<http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/kathapollitt>
Source: The Nation
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Katha Pollitt's ZSpace Page<http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/kathapoll
itt>
Join ZSpace<http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/signup>
And the winner is... Iceland! According to the 2009 Global Gender Gap repor
t of the World Economic Forum, the land of glaciers and puffins, population
319,000, is the most gender egalitarian country on earth, with women havin
g closed 80 percent of the gap with men. Finland (2), Norway (3), Sweden (4
) and Denmark (7) are in the top ten too, as is New Zealand (5). You could
try harder, Spain (17) and Germany (12)--in 2007 you were in the top ten. A
nd O, Canada: 25. Very sad.
The WEF measures the gap between women and men in four areas--economic acti
vity, education, health and political representation--regardless of the abs
olute level of resources. Thus South Africa (6) and Lesotho (10) make the t
op ten, despite widespread poverty, illiteracy and a raging AIDS epidemic.
The way the WEP measures the gap is a bit strange. Among the items not meas
ured are reproductive rights (abortion is banned in Ireland (8), and the Ph
ilippines (9), where birth control is also hard to find, so how equal is th
at?); sexual violence (South Africa has the world's highest rate of reporte
d rape); and legal inequality, to say nothing of cultural practices like fo
rced marriage, child marriage and female genital mutilation, and the dispro
portionate effect of poverty on women. Thus, in Lesotho, with one of the wo
rld's highest rates of HIV, it's the desperately poor grandmothers who are
raising throngs of orphaned grandchildren. Still, let's pause to cheer the
fact that there has been measurable improvement for the female population i
n much of the world. As the report notes, "Out of the 115 countries covered
in the report since 2006, more than two-thirds have posted gains in overal
l index scores, indicating that the world in general has made progress towa
rds equality between men and women."
Indeed, progress can be lightning swift: South Africa advanced sixteen plac
es, partly because a new government brought in more women. Iceland increase
d women's representation in Parliament from 33 percent to 43 percent in jus
t one year (fun fact--last year Icelandic voters elected Johanna Sigurdardo
ttir, the world's first openly lesbian prime minister, who returned the fav
or by appointing five women to her interim cabinet, the most in the country
's history). Compare that with the United States, where it took all of the
2000s to drag Congress from 13 percent to 17 percent. Indeed, we rank 61 in
political representation, for an overall mediocre score of 31, sandwiched
between Lithuania and Namibia. The bottom third of the list is filled with
Middle Eastern, Asian and African nations where progress for women is slow
or nonexistent: India, for example, gets pretty good press as a rapidly mod
ernizing society, but it comes in at 114, down from 113 in 2008--closer tha
n you might think to notoriously oppressive Iran (128) or Pakistan (132), t
o say nothing of Chad (133) and Yemen (last place).
That women are gradually moving up in the world--the WEP maintains that glo
bally women have closed 93 percent of the education gap and 96 percent of t
he health gap--is definitely not the picture you would get from following t
he headlines, where the news is often unbearable. Right now, for example, A
malia, a young Nicaraguan, is being denied treatment for her cancer. She is
twelve weeks pregnant, you see, and doctors are afraid to risk violating t
he total ban on abortion brought in by Marxist-turned-Catholic Daniel Orteg
a--even if without treatment she dies, and her fetus dies and her 10-year-o
ld daughter is left motherless. Amalia is not the only Nicaraguan to have s
uffered as a result of this law--according to Amnesty International, it has
caused an increase in maternal deaths. In Turkey, honor killings were high
lighted by the gruesome murder of 16-year-old Medine Memi, buried alive by
her father because she talked to boys. From Malaysia to Nigeria, women in t
he Muslim world face canings, floggings and executions for violating Sharia
law--for example, by being raped, like 13-year-old Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow o
f Somalia, stoned to death by fifty men before a stadium audience of 1,000.
And what of women caught up in the thirty-three wars raging around the glo
be, as in Congo, where horrific rapes and tortures are pervasive? Catastrop
hic violence like that can reduce one to despair pretty quickly.
Protracted struggle is the theme of the UN's Beijing Plus 15 conference, ta
king place in New York as I write. For example, equal access to education w
as a key goal of the 1990 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, and,
as the WEF report found, real progress has been made--in many countries, f
emales now outnumber males in schools and universities. But education is no
magic bullet. As Mario Osava writes, "females represent a majority at ever
y level of education in Brazil, and the average rate of schooling among Bra
zilian women is more than one year higher than that of men. Yet women conti
nue to earn 30 percent less than men for the same work, and they occupy a m
ere 56 of the 594 seats in the Brazilian Congress."
What's the lesson for the United States? Wealth helps, but it's not enough.
It's not automatic that as a country becomes richer and more developed men
and women become more equal--especially when conservative religion has pow
er, as in the United States and many nations. To an unusual degree, America
ns resist "government" solutions to women's inequality as an affront to mer
itocracy and individual initiative. But without paid parental leave and a r
eliable system of quality childcare, women will never be able to get much f
urther toward workplace equality than they are now. Scandinavia's extensive
and flexible system of support for parents, including single mothers, is o
ne of the major reasons Scandinavia leads the world in gender equality. Sim
ilarly, countries with lots of women in parliament--Rwanda is first, with 5
6 percent--tend to have quota systems, at least at first. The United States
seemed to recognize their efficiency and fairness when it supported quotas
in Iraq and Afghanistan. But here at home? Hard to imagine.
Katha Pollitt's writing has appeared in many publications, including The Ne
w Yorker, The London Review of Books, the Washington Post and the New York
Times. Her new book of poems, The Mind-Body Problem<http://www.amazon.com/g
p/product/1400063337/ref=s9_simz_gw_s0_p14_t1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DERpf_r
d_s=center-2pf_rd_r=1590898K0Z0NMHDZQWRWpf_rd_t=101pf_rd_p=47093863
pf_rd_i=507846>, has just been published by Random House. Her previous bo
oks include Learning to Drive: and Other Life Stories<http://www.amazon.com
/Learning-Drive-Other-Life-Stories/dp/0812973542/ref=%20ed_oe_p> (Random
House), a collection of personal essays.