The text below throws some light on the position of women in modern society. Read it and do the exercises that follow

READING ONE

Starter activity

For years the issue of gender equality has been the focus of attention at various levels – from kitchen talks to international conferences. Outline the problems of gender equality (or inequality) that exist and are worth discussing.

A Woman’s Place

If she is bright enough, ambitious enough, has a good idea and wants to make it work, a woman in Nairobi can go to one of a few banks in the world designed exclusively for women, and it will make sure that she gets a loan. If she wants to learn to read, however, it may be more difficult.

Such are the contradictions in the status of women as the United Nations Decade for Women draws to a close. The Kenya women Finance Trust of Nairobi has operated for a year, easing women into the male-dominated world of banking by helping with loans, providing advice and offering technical help. Yet in Africa as a whole, eight women out of ten are illiterate.

It is an irony typical of the ten years the UN has devoted to bettering the lot of one half of the world's population. Remarkable success stories co-exist with blatant discrimination, huge advances are balanced by humiliating retreats. In India, for example, a development plan has been introduced to improve job training for women and ensure equal access to employment. Across the border in Pakistan, if a woman has been raped she has to have the supporting testimony of four men in order to bring charges against her assailant. If she cannot provide sufficient evidence, then she may well be flogged.

In Japan, statistics showed that only 2,3 per cent of women were unemployed. Yet another survey showed that 72 per cent of the Japanese believe a woman should put her family ahead of her job, and less than one third thought a woman had a right to divorce a husband she could not stand.

In the working world, women still come a distant second to men While unemployment has skyrocketed almost everywhere in the past ten years, the
increase has generally affected women more sharply. In a few countries, such as the United States and Japan, women enjoy a higher rate of employment than men. But in both countries women are paid far less. In the US the average working woman earned 13 000 dollars in 1982, whereas the average man earned 21 000 dollars. In Japan the differential between men and women’s wages was greater in 1982 than it had been in 1975.

According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) lower wages for women are common in most countries, irrespective of the level of economic development. The ILO believes that women are steered towards the traditional jobs that men do not want and that they are blocked from higher education and skills training.

While in the developed world there are more female lawyers, managers and politicians than before, and women in communications are numerous, they are still heavily outnumbered by men. In developing countries women's work is often little more than the most menial of labour. The ILO gives the example of women in Thailand who are required to spend eight hours a day staring at hair-width gold wires through microscopes, building up to 800 microchips a day, at 50 wires per chip. Without training, women cannot get at the credit, technology and financial resources needed to improve their lot. Six out of ten world’s illiterates are women and in 1980 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) counted seven countries where virtually no women could read or write.

Even in Europe the work opportunities for women leave a lot to be desired. Britain was famous for having a woman Prime Minister, but only a fraction of Parliament’s seats were held by women and there were no other women in the Cabinet. According to activist Georgina Ashworth the decade in Britain was a failure, partly because women themselves were not allowed to hear about it, so they weren’t able to make demands.

Elsewhere in the world women have found cultural prejudices as hard to change as political ones. The spread of Islamic fundamentalism has meant the return of the chador and the loss of many hard-won freedoms. Female circumcision is still practised in many countries and in South Africa women aren’t covered by labour legislation, maternity benefits or unemployment insurance provisions.

At the UN Women’s Conference in China Mrs. Hilary Clinton strongly denounced human rights violations in China and elsewhere.

“It is a violation of human rights when baby girls are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines are broken, simply because they are born girls!” she said.

“It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families – and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilised against their will.”

Without mentioning the name of any country in her litany of human rights abuses Mrs. Clinton managed to condemn the Indian practice of burning brides when their marriage dowries are deemed too small; the African custom of performing “genital mutilation” on women, the war in Bosnia and other conflicts.

Yet perhaps we shouldn’t spend all of the time complaining. The Decade for women may be judged a failure, but at least it has been a step in the right direction. Women’s interests have become an issue: twenty years ago they weren’t even spoken about.

Kelly McParland. For a Change. 2001

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