Women's Rights

The pursuit of equal rights for women through international law has been a slow process. The principle that everyone is entitled to rights "without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex..." was given voice in Article 2 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, the Declaration was non-binding and it took campaigners over 30 years to cajole the international community into concrete legal action against gender injustice.

Two schoolgirls, India, November 2003 © Peter Armstrong

This commitment came in the shape of the Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1979. CEDAW has been described as a bill of rights for women; it spells out the areas in which women experience discrimination and commits countries to amend their laws, construct national gender policies and create institutions to deliver them.

Although CEDAW has been ratified by almost all countries, overall global progress remains disappointing. Over twenty states have exercised reservations in the ratification process, a formal device which permits exemption from contentious sections. Ineffective enforcement of national legislation has further restrained the pace of reform, as has the failure of the US to ratify the treaty.

A positive development in 2009 was the decision to merge the four UN agencies currently engaged in gender issues. The new entity should bring greater coherence and will enjoy a more senior position in the hierarchy of reporting to the Secretary-General.
Barriers to Equality

Resistance to new laws and their implementation in developing countries is motivated by strong traditional beliefs that women should occupy a domestic environment and that men should enjoy exclusive rights to property. Modern industrialised countries have of course experienced similar attitudes at earlier stages of their development.

Many countries in sub-Saharan Africa are therefore in the process of amending laws which prevent women from owning land and property. The HIV/AIDS crisis has accentuated the injustice, given that over 30% of households in the region are now headed by women, few of whom can claim ownership rights.

This transition to more equal rights is most problematic in Islamic countries where elements of Sharia law governing the behaviour of women remain in place. In extreme examples, these ancient laws declaim that adultery is a crime when carried out by women, and make it virtually impossible for a man to be convicted of rape.

Malian woman in Dire © Dan Gerber

In Mali, parliamentary approval of new laws recognising the rights of women in 2009 led to public protests by conservative Muslim groups. As a result, the president refused the sign the bill into law, to the despair of local women’s groups.

Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian Nobel laureate, believes that the treatment of women in Islamic countries does not reflect the teachings of the Koran. She advocates a reinterpretation of Sharia law to recognise women's rights.

One of the most shameful illustrations of cultural bias against women relates to the practice of sex-selective abortion and female infanticide, notably in China and India. In China, 118 boys were born in 2005 for every 100 girls.
Women's Livelihoods

Women Carrying Water © World Bank

Low cultural status for women translates into unequal opportunities for decent work. Just over half of all women in developing countries perform unpaid labour, typically a demanding combination of subsistence farming and caring for an extended family. Poverty greatly compounds the physical burden of this work, ranging from the collection of water to the use of hand tools for husbandry.

Beyond the domestic environment, women’s livelihoods are predominantly in low paid and informal sectors. Lacking security or safety nets, this “flexible” pool of labour is vulnerable to economic recession or unstable prices of food and fuel. In Asia, concern focuses on the concentration of women at the bottom of the production chain in factories with dubious labour conditions.

The aptitude that women demonstrate for running small enterprises has been advanced by the success of microcredit schemes, especially in South Asia. The pioneering Grameen bank of Bangladesh reports that over 90% of its borrowers are women, an inversion of mainstream banking profiles.
Education and Gender

Extreme poverty reinforces cultural expectations that girls should work in the home and quickly marry, rather than attend school. According to the international agency, ActionAid, 40 million girls go without primary education and almost two thirds of illiterate adults are women. UNICEF reports that over 40% of girls in Africa marry before the age of 18.

Benin school room © Dan Gerber

Education is ultimately more effective than laws in empowering women to overcome the barriers to equal rights. Educated girls are more likely to resist pressures to marry too young, to have too many children and to resign themselves to unpaid work. They have greater competence as mothers and as active agents in their communities.

The 3rd of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) recognised this imperative in setting a target to eliminate gender disparity in enrolment for primary and secondary education by 2005. This was far in advance of the 2015 deadline for other MDGs, including the Goal to provide universal primary education. Unfortunately, even by 2007 over 100 countries had still not achieved gender parity. The UN has called for “renewed urgency and commitment” to reach the Goal by the later date of 2015.

Specific action necessary to accelerate progress is complex and varies for each country. There is some agreement, however, that the two most important steps are to remove fees for education (so that parents have less reason to favour boys over girls) and to improve school sanitation facilities to allow appropriate privacy for girls. The costs are high and lack of finance is often the constraint.
Women and Development

Woman leader at meeting, Benin © Dan Gerber

The overall aim of MDG 3 - "to promote gender equality and empower women" - treats the principle of women’s rights as sufficient in itself. This overlooks that women are the key actors in almost every aspect of human development tackled by the Millennium Declaration, especially those involving health and nutrition.

The majority of international NGOs and donor agencies have extensively integrated gender issues into their development programmes. They feel that the MDGs too should have adopted this approach. One inevitable consequence of the omission is the tendency to aggregate development data for both sexes, often concealing important gender issues.

For example, the UN’s MDG progress update for 2009 reports that 1.4 billion people live below the international poverty line, without mentioning the gender split. Yet the Millennium Campaign believes that up to 70% of the world’s poor are women. This makes all the difference in preparing development strategies. For example, the response to the global food crisis would benefit from accurate data about the extensive role of women in small-scale farming.
Women and Climate Change

Adaptation to climate change in developing countries must address the sustainability of water and crop management, areas in which women are predominantly engaged. The majority of farmers in these countries are women, producing 60%-80% of food resources.

Baby Sidr was born in a shelter during the Bangladesh cyclone © CAFOD

Researchers also report dramatic gender differences in the impact of natural disasters. Women and children are 14 times more likely to perish, such is the significance of physical endurance in the most extreme situations. Disaster management plans should be influenced by such statistics.

With women so much in evidence in the front line of the impact of climate change, it is surprising that decades of international climate negotiations have been gender blind. Reference to women is absent from the detail of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol. This is likely to be remedied in any legal agreement emerging from the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference.
Reproductive Health

Access to reproductive health services is a vital component of women’s empowerment. CEDAW places an obligation on countries to ensure that women have the same rights as men to decide the "number and spacing of their children and to have access to the information, education and means to enable them to exercise these rights."

This vision gained a crucial boost at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development. The outcome, known as the Cairo Consensus, established a target of universal access to reproductive health services by 2015, now embedded within the MDG programme.

Although implementation and funding of the Consensus has been slower than planned, global use of contraception is steadily increasing. Nevertheless, 200 million women in developing countries, including a quarter of married women in Africa, remain in urgent need of family planning services.

The UN agency responsible for monitoring progress of the Cairo Consensus, the Commission on Population and Development, has estimated that provision of the necessary range of relevant sexual and reproductive health services would cost $27.4 billion in 2010.

Apart from its importance from a rights perspective, improved access to reproductive health services has made a vital contribution to reducing the rate of global population growth. The annual rate has almost halved since its peak of 2.4% in 1963 and the average number of children for each woman has fallen dramatically from 6.0 to 2.6 in this period.

Mother and child, Rwanda © Heidi Martin

Reproductive health embraces not just family planning but also the right to safe motherhood. Alas the Goal to improve maternal health stands out from the other MDGs for its distressing failure to make any progress. The rate of maternal mortality in developing countries has barely changed from the baseline 1990 level of 480 per 100,000 births. Its comparison with an average figure of below 10 in developed countries is an extreme illustration of global injustice. More than half a million women die each year as result of pregnancy, including more than 60,000 through abortion.

Attempts to galvanize funding for reproductive health services must contend with the obstacle of religious conservatism. The Catholic Church, which claims over 1.1 billion followers, resolutely opposes all forms of contraception, despite evidence of the consequent human distress. On a visit to Cameroon in 2009, the Pope suggested that the use of condoms was an inappropriate response to the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa. By contrast, Islamic teachings generally adopt a pragmatic interpretation of the Koran, supporting the right of women to space their children through use of family planning within marriage.

The religious right in the US has been successful in imposing its doctrine at the highest level. The administration of former president Bush withheld contributions of $230 million from the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). Through legislation known as the Global Gag rule, it also prevented US aid agencies from supporting any developing country organisation whose programmes provided support for abortion.

One of President Obama’s first acts was to repeal the Global Gag rule. Normal relations with UNFPA have also been restored.
Violence against Women

Gender violence protest, Indonesia © Jane McGrory

In launching his new 2008 campaign, UNite to End Violence Against Women, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon observed that “at least one out of every three women is likely to be beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime.” Such high level concern about violence against women, alternatively described as gender-based violence, has emerged only in relatively recent years. There is no mention of the subject in CEDAW or in the MDGs.

Whilst rich countries are by no means free of violence against women, the problems - which range from domestic violence to honour killings - are perceived to be more serious in developing countries. The task of its elimination must involve a combination of legislation and cultural evolution, encouraging women to disclose their experiences.

An extreme example of the necessity for effective legislation occurs in those African countries where deep-rooted tradition accounts for the widespread practice of female genital mutilation (FGM). Despite being outlawed in most of the 28 countries where it survives, FGM endangers perhaps as many as three million girls each year.

The incidence of violence against women is known to increase in circumstances of economic stress or conflict. In the extreme, rape has been exploited as a weapon of war. The incidence of rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Darfur, Northern Uganda and Sierra Leone may never be known, let alone carry any hope of accountability.
Women's Voices

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf © Center for Global Development

Principles of equality and empowerment lie behind the encouragement of greater representation of women in all levels of government. Women are more likely than men to keep sight of the human dimension in problem-solving and to favour peaceful resolution of conflict.

Indeed, the most interesting developments in women’s political participation occur in some post-conflict countries whose constitutions have been torn up and rewritten. The Rwandan parliament has the highest representation of women in the world with over 50%. The 2008 election for a Constituent Assembly in Nepal featured generous quotas for women candidates. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Africa's first female president, has been elected in Liberia, a country torn apart by conflict and corruption.

The overall picture is however less encouraging with only 17 women amongst 192 heads of government as at mid-2009 and average women’s representation in national parliaments barely over 18%. These ratios are however improving slowly and there is evidence that quotas and elections through proportional representation can be effective mechanisms to achieve greater women’s representation.

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