THE ELUSIVE GOAL OF GENDER EQUALITY

The issue of gender equality has achieved, on a worldwide scale, very much the same position as the issues of slavery and torture. That is to say, while it is now generally accepted around the globe that gender equality is a burning issue that must be dealt with and while, in general, the inequality of women, abuse of women’s rights and gender violence are all considered to be throwbacks to barbarism and aberrations in modern society, the fact is that there is still a very long way to go in creating a world in which men and women are, indeed, on an equal footing.

The fact of the matter today is that, while the world has undoubtedly made serious advancements toward gender equality, and while the empowerment of women has grown within the context of year 2000 global Millennium Development Goals (including increased equal access to primary education between girls and boys), the surface has barely been scratched, and women and girls continue to suffer discrimination and violence in every single part of the world. This is a statement of fact that should not only be the subject of shock and dismay, but also a source of profound embarrassment and chagrin to world leaders as a whole, because there can be little doubt that not nearly enough has been done to make gender equality a global priority goal and less still to effectively lift oppressed women everywhere out of poverty, ignorance and servitude, when these are goals that are eminently achievable in every nation on earth. All it takes is a clear-cut decision to effect immediate legal and cultural change.

In a world where social networks have provided a vehicle for the free exchange of information at a grassroots level, activism has become exceedingly more feasible than ever before. And there is greater awareness all the time of the plight of many women worldwide who continue to live within the constraints of practically medieval cultures where members of their gender are still treated like chattel, bereft of almost any rights whatsoever. But even within these closed, fundamentalist cultures, the light of awareness is beginning to slip in through the cracks, as worldwide activism drives a trend toward no longer accepting as “cultural”, or “religious”, or “private” actions that deny women their inalienable human rights or that subject them to the dictates and laws of patriarchal societies.  

Still, the problem of inequality persists on an enormous scale. One of the problems is, of course, that just about every society in the world that one can think of continues, to a greater or lesser degree, to be “patriarchal”—in fact if not in nature. Governments even in the most advanced nations on earth continue to be dominated by men as does business and high finance, despite high-profile cases of women at the top. And clearly, while men in high places are, indeed, generally “alpha males”, as it were, women are usually required to make far greater efforts and to be far more outstanding in their careers than their male counterparts in order to achieve positions of similar empowerment.

What this signifies is that, when it comes to guaranteeing the rights and advancement of women at every other level of society, the tasks involved in doing so are seldom given top priority or even the basic, minimal consideration that they deserve and require. That being said, female empowerment is an absolutely and immediately achievable goal. It only requires the social, legal and political will to do so in order to become a reality.

Even with the great strides that women have made over the course of the past thirty years, statistics gathered by important activist groups tell a story of major continuing inequality. One such group is UN Women, an intergovernmental organization that operates under United Nations auspices. According to the group, despite forming roughly half of the world’s population, women today hold only 22.8% of all national parliamentary seats (up, however, from just 11.3% in 1995). Only ten women are currently serving as heads of state and nine as heads of government. Around the world today, out of 196 States that currently exist, there are 38 in which women hold less than 10% of all parliamentary seats, and in four parliamentary chambers among those countries, there are no women at all.

More specifically, across regions, UN Women’s statistics show that the greatest proportion of women in national legislative branches is in Nordic countries (41.1%). But in Europe, if you exclude the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden), this ratio drops to 24.3%. In the Americas, the average is 27.7%, while in sub-Saharan Africa, it runs 23.1%. In Asia, women make up only 19.2% of all parliamentarians. In the Arab States, the ratio slips to 18.4% and among Pacific Ocean countries, to 13.5%. Surprisingly, certainly, to many central nations that consider themselves to be “highly advanced” in terms of gender equality, UN Women’s statistics show that the country with the largest number of women parliamentarians on a worldwide scale is Rwanda, where women have won 68.3% of all seats in the lower house.

Rwandan women paid an onerous price for that kind of equality. In 1994, in the midst of political in-fighting, extremist Hutus sought to wipe out the minority Tutsi population. They carried out a genocidal slaughter in which more than a million people were brutally murdered.

There are numerous theories about how gender equality unwittingly profited from that horrendous butchery as the world looked on and pretended to see nothing. But it came as Rwanda, with the help of the UN and a post facto international genocide inquiry, sought to pick up the pieces of its shattered nation. What took place, according to Saadia Zahidi of the World Economic Forum, was a change in dynamics. In an interview with GlobalNews Canada, she said that following the genocide, there were fewer men who were willing and able to work and women took up the slack. Widows, she indicated, banded together and demanded political and economic power. They eventually effected changes in Rwanda’s constitution to require that women hold at least 30 percent of the country’s top political posts. That in turn provided them with necessary clout in the election process, and today the country has the highest percentage of women in parliament of any country in the world.

While this may seem like an admirable outcome on the heels of certainly one of the most horrible and shameful events in recent world history, it should give us pause. The moral would appear to be that women’s rights are so repressed, even in major Western nations, that only a cataclysmic political episode can shake up the patriarchal cultural system sufficiently for women to significantly benefit and become empowered on the road to gender equality and political standing.

For those who wonder how on earth, short of a genocide, one can even start to overcome centuries of discrimination, repression and social attitude and set women on the path to full empowerment, there are clear-cut steps toward achievement of such a goal. It all starts, like most change, with education, beginning with measures aimed at providing post-primary schooling for all girls while continuing to make good on commitments for imposing universal compulsory primary education.

A second step is to impose hard and fast guarantees for women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights. And this should go hand in hand with guaranteed protection of women’s and girls’ property and inheritance rights. Furthermore, laws must be put in place, and should be imposed as a matter of course in every nation on earth, to guarantee protection of women and girls against every brand of gender-focused violence including such ritual evils as “honor killings” and war rape, both of which go largely unpunished in many parts of the world.    

Infrastructure programs must give priority to reducing the menial labor that currently occupies the time of women and girls in many low income nations around the world, and gender inequality in the workplace should be reduced and eventually eliminated entirely by ending the reliance of women on informal employment as a means of earning a living. Gender gaps should also be closed in terms of earnings, with the goal being equal pay for equal work, and it follows, then, that the form of job discrimination known as “gender segregation” must be eliminated.

For all of this to happen, women must turn increasingly toward classic activism and organization to demand their fair share of political power in both national parliaments and local government. Only with the advancement of women’s political empowerment will all of these other gender equality advancements become a reality. And no one in a patriarchal world is apt to hand that kind of empowerment over without a struggle. Women and the liberal men who support their cause will have to stand up for themselves and take the equality that is rightfully theirs, as racial and ethnic minorities have done before them in their own civil rights struggles.

The world stands to benefit in every way from the empowerment of women and from the political, social and cultural changes that women of substance are sure to bring.