Albright Decries Low Status of Women

Offering a sobering assessment of the international status of women, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said Tuesday that in many parts of the world, women remain “an undervalued and underdeveloped human resource”--exploited, discriminated against and even sold.

Trafficking in women and girls is “one of the fastest-growing criminal enterprises in the world,” Albright, the first woman to be secretary of state, told the annual California Governor’s Conference for Women, meeting in Long Beach.

Restricting herself for the most part to generalizations, Albright said that although women do most of the work in many societies, they are “barred from owning land and permitted little if any say in government, while girls are often excluded from schools and provided less nourishment than boys.”

“In our diplomacy,” she said, “we are working with others to change that, because we know from experience that when women’s voices are heard and choices heeded, societies are better able to break the chains of poverty.

“Birth rates stabilize,” she said. “Environmental awareness increases. The spread of AIDS and other sexually transmitted disease slows. And socially constructive values are more likely to be passed on to the young. . . .

“Economists will tell you,” she added, “that, especially in the developing world, income controlled by the mother is far more likely to promote the health and education of children than income controlled by the father.”

The secretary said the United States has used foreign aid to promote the cause of women’s rights in countries such as Yemen, Peru, Ethiopia and Morocco.

But, she said, “in many countries, appalling abuses are committed against women. These include coerced abortions and sterilizations, children sold into prostitution, ritual mutilations, dowry murders and domestic violence.

“There are those who suggest that all this is cultural and there’s nothing we can do about it,” Albright added. “I say it’s criminal and we each have a responsibility to stop it.”

The only country Albright criticized by name was Afghanistan, where the government has been controlled by the Taliban, an Islamic fundamentalist militia, since 1996. Through a series of decrees, the regime has banned women from the work force, closed girls schools and forced women to cover themselves from head to toe in religious shrouds.

“The Taliban . . . seems determined to drag Afghan women back from the dawn of the 21st century to somewhere closer to the 13th,” Albright said. “The only female rights they appear to recognize are the rights to remain silent and uneducated, unheard and unemployed.”

Organizers of the conference at which Albright spoke said that it drew a record 8,500 people to the Long Beach Convention Center for a daylong series of speeches, panel discussions and networking opportunities.

Among the speakers was UC Berkeley business school dean Laura d’Andrea Tyson, formerly chairwoman of President Clinton’s National Economic Council, who said that the most worrisome sign in the U.S. economy is too much borrowing against stock market assets, on the assumption that stock values will hold or rise.

But she said that she is optimistic that any economic difficulties will be short-lived. She predicted that the economy would continue to expand at the rate of 2% to 3% per year.