WOMEN AND POWER : World View : A threshold is being crossed from tokenism to tangible progress. But gender parity is a long way off.

In an extraordinary 24-hour period this month, three women in disparate parts of the world were selected for powerful positions. Each, in more ways than one, marked a watershed.

In Turkey--a country where articles 152 and 153 of the civil code still stipulate that “the husband is the family head” and the home is the wife’s responsibility--Tansu Ciller was appointed prime minister.

In Canada, Kim Campbell was elected leader of the ruling Progressive Conservative Party, automatically becoming prime minister and the first-ever female head of government in North America.

And in the United States, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was nominated for the Supreme Court, ending speculation that, like other minority quotas on the court, only one slot would ever be filled by a female justice.

In Vienna just one day later, a coalition of about 950 women’s groups from the globe’s far corners came together at the U.N. World Conference on Human Rights and all but stole the show.

The highlight of their campaign was a mock “global tribunal” chronicling a half-century of political, physical and cultural abuse of women. Their gripping testimonies ranged from that of a Korean “sex slave” forced to serve Japanese soldiers during World War II to Bosnian, Palestinian and Peruvian women detailing the often life-threatening impact of contemporary political repression.

The U.N. conference underlined how far women in many parts of the world still have to go. At the same time, however, its clear message was that--one way or another--the world is increasingly unable to drown out the voice of half its population.

In diverse forms in disparate places, women worldwide are increasingly earning, convincing, campaigning, demanding and promoting their way onto the global agenda. More are gaining true political and economic power. Others remain far behind but--though often only slowly--are closing the gap.

Both the achievements and the movement of the 1990s are distinguished in many ways from previous decades.

On Their Own

Unlike the emergence of so many earlier leading ladies--the Netherlands’ Queen Juliana in the 1940s, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth in the 1950s, India’s Indira Gandhi in the 1960s, Argentina’s Isabel Peron in the 1970s and the Philippines’ Corazon Aquino in the 1980s--women at the top are no longer usually hereditary monarchs or relatives of famous former politicos.

Turkey’s Ciller, an economist, particularly stands out from the two other women who have risen to power in Islamic countries. Benazir Bhutto followed her father as Pakistan’s prime minister, while Khaleda Zia succeeded her late husband as Bangladesh’s leader. In stark contrast, Ciller’s husband took her name when they married.

And the new female leaders are no longer alone. Two of Canada’s three major parties are now headed by women, while the third’s deputy leader is female. Worldwide, six countries now have female prime ministers, three have female presidents and three female governors general--some in unlikely places.

In the male-dominated world of Irish politics, Mary Robinson beat thousand-to-one odds in 1990 to win the presidency, while in 1992 Hanna Suchocka became the first woman to lead a government in Poland since Queen Jadwiga in the 14th Century.

And among the more than 4,000 female judges from 37 countries that belong to the International Assn. of Women Judges, at least seven nations--Costa Rica, Panama, the Philippines, Romania, Mexico, France and Canada--now have two women on their high court.

In the 1990s, women are even breaking ground in unlikely professions--as bullfighters in Spain’s macho society and as peasant leaders in Mexico’s slums.

“Women rising to the top are no longer a fluke. They’re now part of a major trend,” said Joe Ryan, resident scholar at Freedom House, a global human rights monitoring group.

“We’re going to see more and more women in high elected and appointed positions,” Ryan said. “I even expect we’ll see a woman secretary general of United Nations soon.” Ireland’s Robinson is often mentioned as a possible candidate.

Tangible Progress

While global gender parity is still a long way off, a threshold is being crossed from tokenism to tangible, even occasionally substantial, progress. And viewed historically, the change is stunning.

After millennia of being excluded or marginalized, one nation--and an unlikely one at that--finally enfranchised women in the 19th Century: Women voted for the first time in 1893 in New Zealand--27 years before the United States passed the 19th Amendment.

There are still holdouts--notably in many Arab Gulf states where there is universal suffrage for neither men nor women. But virtually everywhere else, the empowering of half the human race by giving women the vote has been one of the most significant achievements of the intervening 100 years. Indeed, it is likely to go down as one of the hallmarks of the 20th Century.

Of the world’s 150 states with legislatures, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Geneva, it is now easier to count the seven countries where women are not represented--the Comoros, Djibouti, Kiribati, Kuwait, the Solomon Islands, Tonga and the United Arab Emirates. Most are bit players on the world stage. Morocco used to be the eighth nation without female legislators, but only last Friday it elected the first two women ever to its Parliament. “The presence of women in national parliaments is one of the clearest indicators of women’s participation in political processes,” concluded the 1992 U.N. study “Women in Politics and Decision-Making in the Late 20th Century.”

Women have the highest proportionate representation in legislatures in Europe, followed by Latin America, Africa and Asia. Sweden and Finland have the largest percentages and Japan the smallest.

And in between, women make up almost 37% of Guyana’s Parliament, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union. As of 1991, women were also Speakers in one of the houses of parliament in eight countries and deputy Speakers in 24.

“The cutting-edge progress in terms of women in political empowerment is their emergence in non-traditional, high-level appointments--as finance ministers in Bhutan, Finland and New Zealand, for example. The new prime minister of Canada was formerly the defense minister,” said Georgia Jones Sorenson, director of the University of Maryland’s Center for Political Leadership and Participation.

Botswana and Colombia have had female foreign ministers, while six of 20 Cabinet posts in Guyana, eight of 21 in Sweden, and three of 10 in the Seychelles are held by women, the Inter-Parliamentary Union survey reported.

Women have also founded political parties for women in eight countries--Canada, Chile, Egypt, Finland, Iceland, the Philippines, South Korea and Yugoslavia--and founded or helped found modern political parties in 47 other countries.

New Ideologies

The reasons for the rise in female power and influence in the 1990s also differ from earlier decades.

A key factor relates to the post-Cold War search for new ideologies and bolder leadership.

“It’s connected with the public’s dissatisfaction with the way things are. Women are seen as different, and therefore good. There’s a common perception that men in public office have really screwed things up. That may change as women become more numerous, but until then, women are likely to have a great deal of success,” Freedom House’s Ryan said.

“Voters also seem more inclined to think women are more honest than men, which has shown up in public opinion polls in the United States, for example. And many of the key issues today--like health care, child care--are thought to get more attention from women than men,” he added.

A second cause may be linked to the demise of socialism and the rise of free markets. In many countries, traditional male leaders are increasingly moving their power base from politics to better paid and more prominent jobs in the private sector.

A third reason is the growing focus since the 1975 U.N. International Women’s Year Conference on women’s rights as part of the broader human rights movement.

“The long-term trend started in 1975 when, for the first time, the United Nations authorized or commanded countries to look at the status of women,” Sorenson said.

“The U.N. conferences in 1975, 1980 and 1985 have in a global sense politicized women. With mass communications, when we hear about progress in other countries, it empowers and supports others to follow suit,” Sorenson said. The impact is not dissimilar to democracy’s domino-like sweep of Eastern Europe over the past four years.

Taking Charge

Finally, women have stopped relying on male allies as the route to power.

“For years in many countries, the tendency of women participating in movements for political change was to accept the premise that they’d work for revolution first and change in the status of women later,” said Dorothy Thomas, director of the Women’s Rights Project of Human Rights Watch.

“Then they woke up and found that their agendas had not been taken up by the movements they supported, and they stopped depending on men in power. So in the late 1980s and 1990s, they began to organize politically and put themselves in power for the purpose of effecting the kind of change they want.”

A potent example has been the success this month of the international women’s coalition at the U.N. human rights conference in Vienna. Because of the Global Campaign for Women’s Rights, three years in the making, women achieved greater recognition--in the debate and the final product--than any other “minority.”

“This is the beginning of the end of the marginalization of women in the human rights movement,” Thomas said.

But progress is clearly uneven.

The gap is enormous, for example, between West European countries, where women make up about 30% of trade union membership and 25% to 45% of membership in major political parties, and many Third World states where there are no unions and only one party.

Many Obstacles

And the pathway to power is still blocked by a host of obstacles. Three U.N. studies report that full political, economic and social equality for women is still a “distant prospect” even in Western countries, while everywhere women have far less access to the tools for development--from education to health care--necessary to break the cycle.

Because of education disparities, for example, two-thirds of the world’s illiterates are women. And while the number of women in the workplace has soared dramatically to 42% in industrialized countries and 34% worldwide, the jobs they hold are generally lower status and lower paid. They are often subject to discrimination or sexual harassment.

“No country treats its women as well as it treats its men, a disappointing result after so many years of debate on gender equality, so many struggles by women and so many changes in national laws,” the 1993 U.N. Human Development Report concluded.

“Women are the world’s largest excluded group. Even though they make up half the adult population . . . they make up just over 10% of the world’s parliamentary representatives and consistently less than 4% of Cabinet ministers or other positions of executive authority.’

Social and cultural traditions--from widow-burning in India and bridal kidnapings in Georgia to female infanticide in China--are also still holding women back. Even in the 1990s, second-class status is bred from girlhood, according to World Vision, a Monrovia, Calif.-based Christian relief and development agency, which has launched a global initiative to focus on the problems of the “girl-child.” And the dramatic political shifts around the world since 1989 have not all been conducive to improvements for women. While communism brought women to power for the first time in many East European countries, women have often not fared as well in the new democracies that replaced socialist rule.

Over the past two years, about 70% of layoffs in Russia have been female workers, while this year women were encouraged by the Ministry of Labor to stay home so men could find employment, according to Dollars and Sense magazine.

Soviet women once earned roughly 70% of what men made; now it has dropped to only 40%. And far more men than women are making the transition to the new private sector.

Politically, female representation in parliaments all over Eastern Europe dropped between 1987 and 1990, according to a U.N. report. In Romania, the drop was from 34% to 4%; in both Hungary and Bulgaria, from 21% to less than 10% and in the former Czechoslovakia, from 30% to 6%, according to the study, titled “The World’s Women 1970-1990.”

Gender Gap Still Wide

The precariousness of the status of women was evident the same week Ginsburg was appointed, when a group of female Foreign Service officers accused the State Department of violating non-discrimination rulings--and went to court to stop the practice.

The depth of the global gender power gap is reflected in Japan, which boasts the world’s highest levels of human development, according to the 1993 U.N. Development Report. But when the ranking is adjusted for gender disparity, Japan slips to 17th on the female scale.

Politically, Japanese women hold only 2% of parliamentary seats and no ministerial positions--compared with an average of 9% in other industrialized nations and 13% in other Asian states, the U.N. survey reported.

Socially, inheritance rights were changed as recently as 1980, raising the amount a woman can inherit from one-third to one-half of her husband’s property. But women still have to wait six months to remarry after a divorce, while men can remarry immediately.

In general, the human development index for women in industrialized countries is only about 80% that of men, and about 60% in the developing world.

“Overall, women have been making political progress globally,” Sorenson of the University of Maryland said. “However, the recent elections in Canada and Turkey can be likened to blips in the evolutionary screen rather than precursors of a new world order.”