Despite Global Gains, Women’s Status Still Suffers

In India, a postmark pronounces that “a daughter is as good as a son.” Israel’s Supreme Court decrees that a woman’s right to equal treatment supersedes millennia-old religious law. To curtail female infanticide, a Chinese regional authority outlaws prenatal tests to determine sex.

The women’s movement, once the preserve of wealthy Western countries, is spreading to the rest of the world.

“What is so impressive is that most of these women have had to fight against far greater odds in societies where they were totally marginalized, and even the idea of a [women’s] movement was not accepted,” said Myra Bovinic, president of the International Center for Research on Women in Washington. “The way it has mushroomed caught even me by surprise.”

Yet on the eve of the International Conference on Women in Beijing next month, women everywhere fare worse than men by just about all measures, concludes the 1995 U.N. Development Program report.

“Women and men still live in an unequal world,” said the report, which was released last week. “. . . While the doors to education and health opportunities have opened rapidly for women, the doors to economic and political opportunities are barely ajar.”

Gains and Losses

Two decades after the United Nations’ first women’s conference, in Mexico City, urged change, economic progress is particularly elusive.

On one hand, women’s financial institutions have grown, and with them economic clout. Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank, which grants small loans to help destitute women set up micro-enterprises, has 3 million clients in 37,000 villages and has inspired imitations in 30 countries. Nearly half of the women who have received Grameen loans are no longer living in poverty, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Likewise, one of the world’s largest unions, with 30 million members, is the Self-Employed Women’s Assn. in India. As Asia’s first mass women’s network, it provides petty vendors, casual laborers, service-sector workers and others with education, a credit union, welfare services, child care and instruction on everything from reproductive rights to widows’ benefits.

Yet at the same time, women’s salaries lag behind men’s in all countries but one--Paraguay--according to the U.S. Commerce Department. Globally, women are growing poorer.

“Poverty has a woman’s face,” said the U.N. Development Program report. “Of 1.3 billion people in poverty, 70% are women.”

Among rural women particularly, the number in poverty exceeds 600 million and is growing by 15 million a year, according to estimates of the International Fund for Agricultural Development in Rome.

The International Center for Research on Women calls it the “feminization of rural poverty.” A report from the center places the blame on worldwide economic crises, civil conflicts and natural calamities, in addition to cultural changes that have eroded the extended family system and sparked an increase in single motherhood.

Botswana is widely heralded as Africa’s democratic success story, yet the country’s laws do not always reflect this. For example, Botswanan law stipulates that husbands collect refunds on income taxes deducted from their wives’ paychecks.

And the government denies citizenship to children of Botswanan women who marry foreign men, even if the family lives in Botswana. In contrast, citizenship is automatic to the offspring of Botswanan men married to foreign women, even if they live abroad.

“If women in developed societies still have to fight battles, then women in poor countries have to fight real wars, sometimes over the most basic issues everyone else takes for granted,” said Selim Jahan, co-author of the U.N. Development Program report.

Working Women

The employment picture for women is also mixed.

The worldwide female work force has skyrocketed, breaking barriers even in the strictest patriarchal societies.

In Saudi Arabia, females must have written permission from men to travel and are forbidden to drive or show their faces in public. Yet the number of businesswomen registered with the Chamber of Commerce in Riyadh has increased fivefold in five years to 2,000, reports the International Labor Organization. Most of them are in retail or real estate.

Among other Muslim societies, Bangladesh imposed a female quota of at least 10% for high civil-service jobs, while Pakistan reserves 5% of all government jobs for women.

In China, where Mao Tse-tung once pronounced, “Women hold up half the sky,” the first law passed by the Communist government that took over in the 1940s banned the holding of concubines and empowered women to own property, choose their husbands, sue for divorce and use their own names. China’s constitution is among the few that openly pledges, “Women enjoy equal rights with men in all spheres of life.”

As a result, the number of Chinese women now working in government, finance, education, culture, public health and the media is growing faster than the number of men, an official study says.

Women in China dominate the profitable livestock industries and account for half of farm output. Budding village enterprises employ 40 million women. Thanks to economic reforms, women now contribute 40% of a family’s income, up from 25% two decades ago.

Yet women workers worldwide are vastly undervalued. The Old Testament book of Leviticus declared a woman’s value to be three-fifths of a man’s--a rule of thumb that seems to prevail thousands of years later.

As a worldwide average, women are paid 30% to 40% less than their male counterparts for the same work, the U.N. Development Program said. And women’s economic contributions are undervalued or not valued to the tune of $11 trillion a year, it said.

“In virtually every country of the world, women work longer hours than men yet share less in the economic rewards,” said Mahbub ul-Haq, the Development Program report’s principal author. “If women’s work were accurately reflected in statistics, it would shatter the myth that men are the main breadwinners of the world.”

Globally, only 20% of managers and fewer than 6% of senior managers are female. Women fare poorly even at the United Nations; only six of the more than 180 ambassadors to the United Nations are women, while women head only four of 32 U.N. agencies.

Women are often the primary victims of economic change.

As China streamlines its economy by privatizing some government-owned enterprises, many businesses are laying workers off to save money. Women, according to the U.S. State Department’s 1995 human rights survey, account for 60% of those dismissed, mainly because enterprises seek to shed their maternity and child-care costs.

Altogether, women are closing the gap with men. But at the current rate, according to another U.N. study, it will take 500 years for women globally to gain equal standing with men in jobs and positions of economic power.

On the political front, women have made monumental inroads even in Africa, the poorest and least developed region, since the last U.N. women’s conference, in Kenya, in 1985.

In South Africa’s 1994 elections for a post-apartheid Parliament, women won 100 of the 400 seats--far more representation than women have in most older democracies and a reflection of the movement’s expanding goals.

In East Africa, Uganda now has a female vice president. Burundi has a female foreign minister. Tanzania’s National Assembly is about 15% female. Rwanda’s first female prime minister was killed in the 1994 massacres.

“In many cases, women in developing countries have become more active and made more progress than their Western counterparts in the political sphere,” said Charlotte Bunch, director of Rutgers University’s Center for Women’s Global Leadership.

Worldwide, seven of the 10 elected female heads of state or government are from poor countries: Bangladesh, Dominica, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Turkey and Sri Lanka (where both the president and prime minister are women). In all of modern history, only 11 other women have been elected to similar jobs.

Politics can be a dangerous pursuit for women. Police broke up a joint meeting of the Kenyan League of Women Voters and the International Federation of Women Lawyers last year, assaulting many of the participants with batons and truncheons.

Opportunities have actually diminished for females in many of the formerly socialist countries that are embracing democracy and free markets.

East European governments have far fewer women than their Communist predecessors. And China admits that women hold limited positions of influence in the government and Communist Party--and none in the Politburo.

Leadership Share

Worldwide, the percentage of seats in Parliament held by women in 1993 actually dropped to 10% from 12% in 1989. And some females are just getting the vote. In June, a Kuwaiti parliamentary committee approved a plan for female suffrage--a century after New Zealand’s women became the first to win the vote.

“Women are still far from sharing equally in decision-making. In fact, they are all but excluded,” according to the U.N. Development Program report.

And where women do gain a foothold, they hold leadership roles largely at the local level in most developed and developing societies, including the United States, Bunch said.

“When you move into the larger policy issues at the regional or national level, women’s representation drops dramatically,” she said. “Women are allowed in the arena of politics that is most close to home--and therefore the more mundane.”

“Women in poor countries are waging tough battles to win equality with their male counterparts,” said U.N. expert Mary Chamie. “But gaining any kind of equality with women in developed societies is a virtually unwinnable war, at least in their lifetimes.”