U.S. Policy on Iraq Is Banking on Women

Many people charge that the U.S. effort to reform the economy of Iraq is all about oil. They’re wrong. It’s all about women.

Feminist organizations are loath to give the Bush White House credit on any front. But the fact is, the administration is making the elevation of the status of women a priority in its efforts to rebuild Iraq, just as it has done in Afghanistan since driving out that country’s repressive Taliban regime.

Thanks in large part to the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has provided $60 million to foster education, more than 2 million schoolgirls are being educated in Afghanistan today. That is in a country where just two years ago girls were forbidden to go to school -- and it is five times the number of females ever educated at once in the central Asian nation.

Positive results already are evident. A Cisco Systems Inc. training academy set up at Kabul University has just graduated its first class of 17 information technology students -- six of them women. In June, the first all-female class will start.

Says Paula Dobriansky, the undersecretary of State for global affairs: “We are working around the world to encourage the participation of women in transitions to a more democratic way of life.”

More than noble sentiment is involved. Elevating the status of women is sound economics.

Indeed, according to a landmark World Bank study titled “Engendering Development,” a woman’s income is four times more beneficial to society than is a man’s.

The reason: “Women reinvest their incomes in the family,” which in turn leads to improvement in the health of children and other such positive steps, says Cheryl Benard of Rand Corp.’s Middle East Public Policy Project in Washington.

“The Bush administration policy could be quite brilliant,” Benard adds, “especially in Iraq.”

Traditionally, Iraq was an advanced society with women participating at all levels of economic life.

“Women went to college and worked in high positions,” recalls Zunaib Salbi, who was born and educated in Baghdad and today heads Women for Women International, a Washington group that assists in postwar societies.

In the last 20 years, however, the situation for women in Iraq has worsened terribly through the privations of war, sanctions and the predations of Saddam Hussein. A majority of school-age girls today are illiterate.

Of course, it is not just overseas where more needs to be done to ensure that women are able to reach their full economic potential.

Despite all the progress that has been made among U.S. companies when it comes to gender equality, disparity in pay persists. Sexual harassment remains a real problem in some corporate cultures. For all too many, the glass ceiling hasn’t been cracked.

In the federal contracting arena, the government awards $252 billion in business annually. Though 38% of firms in the United States are owned by women, only 2% of the contracts go directly to them.

Appropriately enough, some inroads are being made when it comes to contracts related to the Middle East. The first major award given out by USAID -- $62 million for educating Iraqi children -- went to Creative Associates Inc., a Washington firm owned by two women.

An earlier contract to train U.S. Marines in Arabic was given last year to LLE Inc., a Washington language service that has been built up over 24 years by its entrepreneurial owner, Kathleen Diamond. LLE sent its Arabic teachers in December to Camp Lejeune, N.C., to train the Marines.

“We expect to go on training,” Diamond says, “because we’ll be involved in Iraq for some time to come.”

With that in mind, one woman made a bold pitch to President Bush on Tuesday. Terry Neese, the head of Women Impacting Public Policy, an organization of 430,000 firms owned by women, was meeting at the White House with a group of business leaders when she offered an idea: Why not send her members to Iraq to mentor women entrepreneurs?

The president, she says, seemed to like the notion.

And why not? Khadijah, wife of the prophet Muhammad, was herself a wealthy merchant. With a little help, the women of Iraq and the rest of the Middle East soon could join that tradition, lifting the entire region in the process.

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James Flanigan can be reached at jim.flanigan

@latimes.com.