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A peace maker constantly seeks to mitigate conflicts and nurtures goodwill for peaceful co-existence. His or Her words and actions do not make things worse, but bring some sense and understanding to the situation. God wants us to live in peace and harmony with his creation; indeed that is the purpose religion. – Mike Ghouse
20 Articles from around the World
GENDER EQUALITY NOW The great poet Philosopher Sir Mohammad Iqbal had said "Wajood-e-zan say hai kayanaat may khushboo" in his beautiful Poetry in Urdu. The essence of which is presence of a woman makes the universe beautiful and complete and vice verse. Men and women are each others protectors, saviors and serve each other in living a purposeful life. One is incomplete without the other, adds the the Qur'aan, "Men and Women are each others garments". Just as the garments shield one from the cold and heat, the metaphor encompasses every aspect of life including the vows; in happiness and sorrow, sickness and health, poverty or wealth, weakness or strength, difficulties and comforts, men and women are indeed each other's garment. No matter what faith or culture you follow, the essence of the vows is the same; justice.
A disgruntled couple
was traveling in the country side; neither was
speaking with the other. As they drove by a
preserve, both of them spotted the wild boars on the
roadside fighting each other. The spouting Husband
opens his murderous mouth and looks at his wife
"Your relatives?" She retorts right back "Yes,
in-laws". Men need to outgrow
their insecurities. To feel secure, some men scream,
shout, suppress and oppress the other, deep down
that makes them even more insecure. Men need to
learn that to be secure; they have to learn to be
equal with their partner in life. Accept it when you
or she is wrong, there is no need to pretend and
feed the insecurity. She is there to protect you and
vice versa. You are each others respect and dignity. Mothers have more influence with the kids than the fathers; it behooves them to train their kids to grow up respecting every human regardless of their gender, age, race, face or faith. Let the kids learn that work is genderless; with a few well defined exceptions, each person is capable of doing every work. Two generations from now, you can expect the men and women to be true partners and true garments of each other. Change does not have to happen with a Tsunami, it should happen with each single effort. We should not demand others to do it, we have to do it ourselves first, and let others do it with their own volition. At least we can we say, we have don our part and it will serve us well. I will do my part.
ROUND UP FROM AROUND THE WORLD:
BEST COUNTRIES TO BE A WOMAN Measures of well-being include life expectancy, education, purchasing power and standard of living. Not surprisingly, the top 10 countries are among the world's wealthiest. 1. Iceland 2. Norway 3. Australia 4. Canada 5. Ireland 6. Sweden 7. Switzerland 8. Japan 9. Netherlands 10. France SOURCE: UNDP Gender-related development index
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY TEN WORST COUNTRIES FOR WOMEN In spite of real progress around the globe, the bedrock problems that have dogged women for centuries remain Mar 08, 2008 04:30 AM The image of the 21st century woman is confident, prosperous, glowing with health and beauty. But for many of the 3.3 billion female occupants of our planet, the perks of the cyber age never arrived. As International Women's Day is celebrated today, they continue to feel the age-old lash of violence, repression, isolation, enforced ignorance and discrimination. "These things are universal," says Taina Bien-Aime, executive director of New York-based Equality Now. "There is not one single country where women can feel absolutely safe." In spite of real progress in women's rights around the globe – better laws, political participation, education and income – the bedrock problems that have dogged women for centuries remain. Even in wealthy countries, there are pockets of private pain where women are unprotected and under attack. Some countries, often the poorest and most conflict-ridden, have a level of violence that makes life unbearable for women. Richer ones may burden them with repressive laws, or sweep the problems of the least advantaged under the carpet. In any country, refugee women are among the most vulnerable. So widespread are the disadvantages that it's hard to pinpoint the worst places in the world for women. Some surveys rate their problems by quality of life, others by health indicators. Human rights groups point to countries where violations are so severe that even murder is routine. Literacy is one of the best indicators of women's status in their countries. But Amnesty International Canada's women's rights campaigner Cheryl Hotchkiss says building schools alone doesn't solve the problem of equal education. "There's a huge range of barriers women face to getting an education," she says. "It may be free and available, but parents won't send their daughters out to school if they can be kidnapped and raped." Health is another key indicator, including the care of pregnant women, who are sometimes forced into disastrous early marriage and childbearing, as well as infection with HIV/AIDS. But again, statistics fail to show the whole, complex story. "On a rural lake in Zambia, I met a woman who had not told her husband she was HIV-positive," says David Morley, CEO of Save the Children Canada. "She was already living on the edge because she had no children. If she told him, she would be kicked off the island and sent alone to the mainland. She felt she had no choice, because she had no power at all." Putting power in women's hands is the biggest challenge for improving their lives in every country, advocates agree. Whether in the poorest countries of Africa, or the most repressive of the Middle East or Asia, lack of control over their own destinies blights women's lives from early childhood. Here are 10 of the worst countries in the world to be a woman today: • Afghanistan: The average Afghan girl will live to only 45 – one year less than an Afghan male. After three decades of war and religion-based repression, an overwhelming number of women are illiterate. More than half of all brides are under 16, and one woman dies in childbirth every half hour. Domestic violence is so common that 87 per cent of women admit to experiencing it. But more than one million widows are on the streets, often forced into prostitution. Afghanistan is the only country in which the female suicide rate is higher than that of males. • Democratic Republic of Congo: In the eastern DRC, a war that claimed more than 3 million lives has ignited again, with women on the front line. Rapes are so brutal and systematic that UN investigators have called them unprecedented. Many victims die; others are infected with HIV and left to look after children alone. Foraging for food and water exposes women to yet more violence. Without money, transport or connections, they have no way of escape. • Iraq: The U.S.-led invasion to "liberate" Iraq from Saddam Hussein has imprisoned women in an inferno of sectarian violence that targets women and girls. The literacy rate, once the highest in the Arab world, is now among the lowest as families fear risking kidnapping and rape by sending girls to school. Women who once went out to work stay home. Meanwhile, more than 1 million women have been displaced from their homes, and millions more are unable to earn enough to eat. • Nepal: Early marriage and childbirth exhaust the country's malnourished women, and one in 24 will die in pregnancy or childbirth. Daughters who aren't married off may be sold to traffickers before they reach their teens. Widows face extreme abuse and discrimination if they're labelled bokshi, meaning witches. A low-level civil war between government and Maoist rebels has forced rural women into guerrilla groups. • Sudan: While Sudanese women have made strides under reformed laws, the plight of those in Darfur, in western Sudan, has worsened. Abduction, rape or forced displacement have destroyed more than 1 million women's lives since 2003. The janjaweed militias have used systematic rape as a demographic weapon, but access to justice is almost impossible for the female victims of violence. • Other countries in which women's lives are significantly worse than men's include Guatemala, where an impoverished female underclass faces domestic violence, rape and the second-highest rate of HIV/AIDS after sub-Saharan Africa. An epidemic of gruesome unsolved murders has left hundreds of women dead, some of their bodies left with hate messages. In Mali, one of the world's poorest countries, few women escape the torture of genital mutilation, many are forced into early marriages, and one in 10 dies in pregnancy or childbirth. In the tribal border areas of Pakistan, women are gang-raped as punishment for men's crimes. But honour killing is more widespread, and a renewed wave of religious extremism is targeting female politicians, human rights workers and lawyers. In oil-rich Saudi Arabia, women are treated as lifelong dependents, under the guardianship of a male relative. Deprived of the right to drive a car or mix with men publicly, they are confined to strictly segregated lives on pain of severe punishment. In the Somali capital, Mogadishu, a vicious civil war has put women, who were the traditional mainstay of the family, under attack. In a society that has broken down, women are exposed daily to rape, dangerously poor health care for pregnancy, and attack by armed gangs. "While the potential of women is recognized at the international level," says World Health Organization director-general Margaret Chan, "this potential will not be realized until conditions improve – often dramatically – in countries and communities. Too many complex factors, often rooted in social and cultural norms, continue to hinder the ability of women and girls to achieve their potential and benefit from social advances." INCOME GAPS Poverty means pain for both men and women, but throughout the world it's women who suffer the most from lack of income. In these countries, women earn less than 50 per cent of men's incomes:
Benin
48 per cent SOURCE: UNDP Human Development Report LITERACY GAPS The better a woman's education, the better chance she and her children have of surviving economically, protecting themselves and leading healthy lives. In these countries, women's literacy rate is less than 50 per cent of men's:
Mali
49 per cent Countries with women's literacy rate less than 70 per cent of men's:
India
65 per cent SOURCES: UNDP, UNESCO, UNICEF INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY Political gender bar still high
Rosemary Speirs
It's International Women's Day, a good day to remember that Canadian women fare well in most respects, but not when it comes to sharing political power with men. In political life, we are behind most of the world's democracies – the United States being another exception.
For week Here in Canada, a federal election looms, with the same old story playing out again. Once again, four men are running for every woman. Our media pundits explain the gender imbalance by saying "women really don't want to run for political office." Too laden with children and dependent spouses and parents, they say. Too bogged down in volunteer work in their communities. Not tough enough for the cut-and-thrust of Parliament. Men are combative; women are collaborative. There's always an unnamed backroom source to quote to the effect that his party has really, really tried to recruit female candidates this time, but women just don't have the taste for political life. It's a facile excuse. The problem is not some dysfunction in Canadian women or bias among Canadian voters. The real reason why women occupy only a fifth of the seats in our House of Commons is that so many other aspiring female candidates were weeded out before they even got to the electoral gate. It starts with our riding-based nomination processes, so open to manipulation and abuse, particularly in the two big-tent parties – Liberals and Conservatives – where the stakes are highest. Most party incumbents aren't required to face a challenge and most incumbents – 80 per cent of them – are men. Male candidates are more likely to be courted to stand; they attract more money to make the run for nomination possible, and men are more likely to get the quiet approving nod from local party honchos. For the next election, Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion vowed that a third of his candidates would be women, and he is exceeding his goal. He's attracted media flak and been accused of thwarting the local nominations process for appointing female candidates in four "winnable" ridings, to ensure strong, high-profile women on the Liberal benches. Meanwhile, Stephen Harper goes unscathed on this issue despite the fact that his Conservative party is running half the number of female candidates. Commentators scarcely mention that the governing party elected only 14 women last time and that the next election will not appreciably enlarge Harper's small contingent of female MPs. No one points out that Canada's dismal record in electing women now is largely due to the failure of our Prime Minister, and his party, to bring women into Conservative ranks. The NDP under Jack Layton puts nominating and electing women high on the agenda. So does Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe. And so, now, do the Liberals under Dion. Here, from the Equal Voice website, equalvoice.ca, is the percentage of women on each party's candidate list: Conservatives: 16.3 per cent Liberals: 35.6 per cent NDP: 39 per cent Bloc Québécois: 29.4 per cent Recently, retired Conservative senator Pat Carney told an interviewer that Harper has woken to the perils of his gender gap, and is about to go a-courting. Let's hope she's right, although the Conservatives have already nominated more than 80 per cent of their candidates. It doesn't have to be this way, even in a party with a large rural constituency that attracts more male votes than female. Once – when Brian Mulroney led the Progressive Conservatives – women's fortunes in Canadian politics appeared steadily on the rise. We even had, briefly, a Progressive Conservative woman prime minister, Kim Campbell. The Conservatives, leading in recent polls, are actually best-placed today to get more women into office. Even with lower numbers of women nominated, the governing party could make a difference by strategically placing its female candidates where they can win. However, Equal Voice researcher Vicky Smallman reports that so many women candidates, including Conservatives, are running in "unwinnable" ridings that the election may not increase the number of female MPs in the Commons. In the last decade, I've watched with envy while women have made exciting gains in politics in other countries, most recently transforming once-macho Spain. Over that same decade, Canada's international rankings – determined by the number of women in its national legislature – has steadily dropped. Today, we are 50th in the world, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union. There are just 65 women in our House of Commons, or 21.3 per cent, way behind most European countries and many so-called "underdeveloped" nations as well. Four by-elections are called for March 19, and in two – Toronto Willowdale and Vancouver Quadra – all three major parties have nominated women. It's a small sign of hope. The number of women in the Commons could rise to 67, or 22.1 per cent, which would move us up to 45th place, tied with Mauritania. It's small comfort that the U.S. will still rank even worse, with 16.8 per cent women in Congress. Canadian women have been jealous that Americans at least have Hillary Clinton as a role model. Instead of wishing on stars, we should turn our attention to the support group, and persuade Harper to get serious about putting more women on the Conservative benches. Rosemary Speirs is past chair of Equal Voice but she is speaking for herself, not Equal Voice, in this article.
Women are still victims! http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/Story.asp?Article=210951&Sn=WORL&IssueID=30354 GENEVA: Women are in the workplace like never before but they are still more vulnerable than men to unemployment and low-paid jobs, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) said yesterday. In a report presented one day before International Women's Day, the ILO said women are more likely to be stuck in low productivity jobs which are poorly paid and precarious. last year, the rate of female labour activity reached 52.5 per cent against 78.8pc for men, the ILO said. Unemployment stood at 6.4pc for women and 5.7pc for men. The activity rate figure was down slightly from 52.9pc recorded a decade ago, which the ILO explained by higher female participation in education. Women in Sub-Saharan Africa have the highest labour activity rate worldwide at 62.6pc but poverty remains widespread. In Iraq, since the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in March 2003, scores of Iraqi men and women who owned or worked in beauty salons have been killed or threatened by religious extremists - mainly Sunni, but also Shi'ite - who believe their work was against Islam. Eman Ahmad, 40, owned a garment shop in the once upscale western neighbourhood of Mansour, but was forced to shutter her business after receiving death threats. The rights of women were well recognised by Saddam's secular Baath party. Women would work openly, even as their traditional roles as mothers and wives remained deeply rooted in the society. But since the US-led invasion the erosion of women's rights in Iraq has become a "national crisis," says a report published on Thursday by Women For Women International, a US-based women's group. More than 100 Kurdish women attempted to commit suicide by self-immolation during the last four months, according to statistics from the Kurdish regional government. Most of such crimes are reported as deaths due to accidental fires in the home. The United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq has regularly highlighted "honour killings" of Kurdish women as among Iraq's most severe human rights abuses. Lebanese women may be known as the Arab world's most liberal but they are by no means the region's most liberated considering antiquated laws that reduce them to second-class citizens. "One of the absurd laws on the books allows a rapist to be exempt from prison if he marries his victim," said Ezzat Mroue, vice-president of the Women's Rights Committee. A woman can be sentenced to two years in prison if a third party accuses her of cheating on her husband, whereas a man has to be caught red-handed before being hauled to court.
Harassed South African women: 'Leave our miniskirts alone'
Agence France-Presse JOHANNESBURG -- Hundreds of South Africans marched on central Johannesburg early this week defending the right of women to wear miniskirts without harassment. The picket was staged near the Noord Street taxi rank where a young woman had her clothes torn off by taxi drivers and hawkers last month, allegedly for showing too much skin. Her assailants allegedly touched the woman's private parts while pouring alcohol over her head and calling her names. The protesters, mostly women and many wearing miniskirts themselves, carried placards reading: "We love our miniskirts", and "We aren't road signs, you need to respect us". Mpumi Ngidi, 26, said she was frequently harassed. "If you are caught between the pavement and a (vendor's) stall and you cross a group of men, at least one in three will try to touch your boobs, your ass ..." she told Agence France-Presse. "I don't wear miniskirts, I don't dress in a sexy way or dress up. It is partly a defense mechanism." Taxi associations condemned last month's incident, which saw several other women coming forward with similar harrowing stories, but twenty-something taxi driver Thulani Nhlapho summed up one male view. "If you are wearing a miniskirt, you give the impression you want to be raped," Nhlapho said. "You respect yourself when you wear a longer skirt. We respect women who respect themselves." Edwin Ndlovu, 29, was among those regarded the procession with great amusement. "We laugh because they are naked," said the car guard. "As a person you have to control your feelings. It is difficult when women are naked. That's how some men end up raping women." Popular radio personality Redi Direko, herself abused in a taxi as a teenager, rejects such statements with contempt. "We have babies who get raped, grandmothers who get raped. When I was assaulted, I was 13 and wearing a school uniform." Direko said it was disturbingly common for women to have their breasts and buttocks fondled on taxis. "There is a lot of patriarchy. The expression of male sexuality is often violent, women have no negotiating power." About 50,000 rapes are reported every year in South Africa, which has one of the world's highest violent crime rates. But activists say the numbers are hugely under-reported, and could amount to a million a year.
Canada's women must share their success with the world Roseann Runte , Citizen SpecialPublished: Saturday, March 08, 2008 Today, International Women's Day, offers a time to celebrate the remarkable achievements of women. It is also appropriate to reflect on the challenges which remain and the very special role Canada and Canadian women can and must play on the world stage. If there are still some 29 countries where less than 30 per cent of women are literate, if there are more than 130 million children in the world without access to primary education, if there are people living and dying without shelter, proper homes or food in our own cities, if we do not realize our national potential in science and technology, the world's problems are indeed serious. Women have had a history of success in civic engagement and the world urgently needs this leadership now. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French historian and social philosopher, noted perhaps the most significant difference between Europe and America was the burgeoning U.S. volunteer sector. He noted the work of individuals and families in building community and social networks. Many years later, Robert Putnam, Harvard professor and author of Bowling Alone, remarked that the involvement of citizens in volunteer and social activities was an indicator of success in government and civic participation. Neither of them noted the incredibly strong and remarkable participation of women who often spent more time with bake sales, the PTAs, churches and hockey leagues than on full-time jobs. Indeed, society failed to value this work, measuring only salary as an indicator of success. At a time when more women than ever are employed, the importance of civil society and civic engagement is becoming recognized by governments, universities and school systems. The good news is the women are still participating and their roles have expanded. They now not only run the bake sales, they operate the bakeries. Their experience is essential in our country today but also in nations where there is no infrastructure. We need to share the concept of the volunteer, of community participation in problem-solving at the grass roots. This is an area where women's expertise and experience are essential. Access to education is an issue recognized as key to the creation of the "Good Society" described by Canadian economist John Kenneth Galbraith. Whether we speak of Northern Ontario or Afghanistan, there is work to be done. If we could provide scholarships to bring qualified women from Afghanistan to every university and college in Canada, think of the incredible impact! We would all learn from and be richer for this experience. This is not an original idea. A foundation in the United States finds qualified students and arranges their travel. The students still need funds for tuition, room and board. A few years ago I asked my mother what she wanted for her birthday. She said "an endowed scholarship for a student from a small town in Northern Ontario." Last year, my former school, Old Dominion, added two more scholarships for young women in Afghanistan. If each one of us could contribute even a small amount to such programs, we could begin to change the world. http://www.canada.com/topics/news/story.html?id=93b2336f-bb6d-46ee-a0ae-feb19f65c0a6&k=94141
Israel
marks Int'l Women's Day with music, drama and art
Israel marked International Women's Day on Saturday with music, drama and art exhibits held across the country. The Jerusalem Bible Lands Museum was to celebrate the day with a concert on Saturday evening, featuring singer Hagit Goldberg presenting the unique styles of female jazz vocalists. These were to vary from Ella Fitzgerald's improvisation to Billie Holiday's powerful vocals. Art galleries in Holon were to host special exhibits dedicated to women, while the 2008 Woman's festival was marked at Holon Theatre and other venues around the city, with events aimed at exploring a woman's need to claim her own closed, personal space. One of the performances to be staged at Holon was "Creatures of the night," a show written by Anat Mor about three very tired new mothers during a long night relating how they experience motherhood. Palestinian women also marked the day, holding small rallies in towns and villages in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Thursday led a group of powerful women, including presidents and prime ministers, in calling for a world where women's talents are used as much as men's to make peace and fight poverty. Also last week, most female Knesset employees were banned from receiving either a promotion or a pay raise in 2008, after they failed to attend mandatory events in honor of International Women's Day. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/961995.html
Fund-raising starts in Beijing to help disfigured
low-income women
The fund, the Rose Fund of China Women's Development Foundation, got its start just ahead of March 8, which is International Women's Day. A nationwide campaign, "Chinese Rose Mission," was launched by several domestic media organizations and beauty salon chains in 2007 to raise funds for women whose disfigurements had affected their lives. The campaign has received more than 3,000 applications for help and its first donation, 1 million yuan, came from a beauty salon chain to kick off the effort, which is the first of its kind in China. Wang Ping, the Secretary-General of the China Women's Development Foundation, said at the opening ceremony of the fund that disfigured women were a very special group who needed more social attention. Wang promised that the fund would help at least 20 disfigured women. http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-03/08/content_7743572.htm
New Zealand: Women still fill traditional roles Mar 8, 2008 6:41 AM Women may be holding their own in the business world but they are still filling the traditional roles at home. A survey of 2000 women by Next Magazine found almost 60% thought a career was important. Editor Brenda Ward says those same people also said they were responsible for most of the domestic chores like dropping the children off at school. She says almost 70% of respondents felt guilty for working and not being with their children. The research was carried out to coincide with the 151st International Women's Day and the National Council of Women of New Zealand is encouraging women to act like ladies - not "blokettes". The council says kiwi women have long been encouraged to do anything they want, with the slogan "girls can do anything". But national president Christine Low says that is resulting in worrying trends. Low says along with a rise in unsafe sexual behaviour, one in four women have revealed they can't remember what they did when they were drinking alcohol. She says women need to know it's perfectly acceptable to act and behave like a woman and not a "blokette" with something to prove to their male counterparts. Women's Refuge is using the day to highlight the country's appalling level of domestic violence. Chief executive Heather Henare says an average of 14 women are killed every year in domestic violence homicides and she says countless others are being injured and scarred for life. Henare says the current It's not Okay campaign on TV is timely and men stepping up and telling their stories is a good way of honouring women. Henare says men in particular must take a lead in making domestic violence a thing of the past. http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/411365/1624720
Is Islam Really Stuck in the 12th Century on Women's Rights? Apparently, they're a couple of decades behind the "liberal" West, and not so stuck after all. Before 9/11/01, the media relegated stories about women in Islamic societies to page B27, below the fold. Ever since 9/12/01, those same stories have screamed from the front pages in 100-point type. The shift in discourse coincided with the launch of Bush's global "War on Terror," when various hawks began using the plight of women in Islam to illustrate the supposed perfidy of our "enemies," and to justify a series of military "interventions" -- invasions -- by Western powers. In the United States, there's now an almost universally held belief that most women in Islamic societies face wretched persecution and that Islam itself is wholly to blame. But there's scant empirical evidence to support the claim -- mostly, we're treated to detailed reports of horrific abuses in theocratic states like Saudi Arabia and Iran, despite the fact that just six-tenths of a percent of the Muslim world live in those two countries. If you ask average Americans how they came to their beliefs about how badly women suffer in Islamic societies, most will reply that "everyone knows it." But I've seen no empirical data to suggest that an Islamic majority itself correlates with the subordination of women better than other co-variables like economic development, women's ability to serve in government, a political culture that values the rule of law or access to higher education. In other words, you can use a comparison of women's status in Saudi Arabia and Sweden to make an intellectually weak argument for Western superiority, but there's little support for the notion that women living in "traditional" Islamic cultures enjoy a lower social status than those in orthodox Christian, Jewish or Hindu communities, to name a few examples. Think of the perfectly backwards Eastern Orthodox Church, the largest Christian communion in the world. Or consider the country where women may be brutalized more terribly than in any other, the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is 70 percent Christian and 10 percent Muslim. Or go to Utah, where tens of thousands of Mormon fundamentalists believe that women are literally the property of their fathers or husbands. Of course, Mormon fundamentalists are the exception that proves the endless benevolence and equality of the West, while whatever despicable caricature of justice perpetrated on a woman by the House of Saud is breathlessly recounted as emblematic of Islamic culture as a whole. Comparing the “Muslim world” to the rest of the world poses an intellectual problem — how does one even look at the role of Islam in a society, specifically, rather than dozens of other variables that might influence women's outcomes? I'd expect, for example, the structure of a country's economy to play a far greater role in determining women's status than the religion of its people. There's quite a bit of research showing that in service and manufacturing economies -- those of wealthier states -- women enjoy a great deal of personal freedom and autonomy, civil and political rights and access to higher education. That's because of the high value of their labor outside the home, in the workforce. Women earning their own bread out in the working world demand, and require, full political rights and legal protections. In poorer economies, most of which have large agricultural sectors and many of which rely on extractive enterprises -- oil, mining, etc. -- women tend to suffer a much lower social status, because their labor is more valuable coerced and sequestered close to home. That's a structural, rather than a "Clash of Civilizations" explanation of women's varying outcomes in different countries. It's the latter view that I find little evidence to support. None of this is a defense of Islam, or women's place within it -- I have little love for religion, any religion, and certainly no desire to defend any religious rites or customs. It's about our loose definitions of the problem and tendency to idealize the "liberal" West. March 8 is International Women's Day, and a new global opinion poll was released to mark the occasion. The results will no doubt come as a surprise to many … According to a new WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of 16 nations from around the world, there is a widespread consensus that it is important for "women to have full equality of rights," and most say it is very important. This is true in Muslim countries as well as Western countries. In nearly all countries, most people perceive that in their lifetime women have gained greater equality. Nonetheless, large majorities would like their government and the United Nations to take an active role in preventing discrimination. Support for equal rights is robust in all Muslim countries. Large majorities say it is important in Iran (78%), Azerbaijan (85%), Egypt (90%), Indonesia (91%), Turkey (91%) and the Palestinian territories (93%). That's no surprise to me, but I wouldn't have bought into the "Yellow Peril" or "Communist Menace" narratives of earlier generations either. The U.S. political class did not suddenly develop an abiding concern for women's equality in a vacuum. Like the promotion of human rights during the Cold War, there is a geopolitical goal being served. The United States has been in a state of permanent war since the 1940s -- when not in a "hot" (real) war, we are, as a society, still under a constant cloud of threat, and our political leaders are all too happy to advance that narrative as long as it plays well politically. But it's not enough to simply be under some ill-defined "threat" from ordinary rivals -- that would just be basic geopolitics -- we're in a permanent fight for our very existence from forces that are wholly pernicious and bent on nothing less than our total destruction. That's become a central aspect of American political culture. We had a seamless transition from World War II to Cold War to Drug War to War on Terror, and in every instance, the unadulterated evil of our opponents has been a consistent theme, as has been our ability to turn a blind eye to the same offenses when perpetrated by the United States or our allies. And now our existential enemies are the spooky brown people of the Muslim world, with their frightening and alien habits and supposed tendency towards "Islamofascism." The problem with that storyline is clear: the Western, predominantly Christian world has far more economic and political influence than the "Muslim world" -- much of which escaped the yoke of colonialism just in the past 50-75 years -- and, more significantly, it has hundreds of thousands of troops on the soil of several predominantly Muslim countries, whereas the reverse does not obtain. In other words, the "threat" of an Islamic takeover of the West is as realistic as the threat of my sweet grandmother beating the Hell out of Mike Tyson. Enter the endless -- and relatively recent -- fascination with the plight of women in Islamic societies. The complete perfidy of Islam -- its supposed backwardness, slavish fundamentalism, brutality against the weak and, especially, expansionist tendencies -- is necessary for (and perfectly suited to) the global war-on-whatever narrative, and therefore, I suggest, worthy of special scrutiny. Consider for a moment the "Islam is stuck in the 12th century" narrative so popular now in the mainstream discourse -- a narrative for which women's civic participation is deemed a vital benchmark. The problem isn't that Islam is being described unfairly, the problem lies with the implication that the "West" made so much progress in the 13th century. The truth is that universal suffrage came to Iran in 1979, five years before women in Liechtenstein got the vote. It came to Bahrain in 2002, 12 years after the Swiss Supreme Court ordered the stubborn Canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden to accept women's suffrage. Portuguese women got the vote in 1976, Swiss women in 1971 -- both in my lifetime -- and in my baby-boomer mother's lifetime, women in Italy, Belgium and Japan first got the franchise. As far as women's political participation goes, parts of the Muslim world -- no, it's not monolithic -- are a few decades, not centuries, behind parts of the West. Is there evidence that the Islamic world is "stuck"? Not at all; in this young century, suffrage has been extended to women in Oman, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE. Active women's rights movements exist in every country on the planet; women were never given rights anywhere without a fight. And when comparing apples and apples -- among economically developed Western democracies -- the United States has very little standing to criticize anyone else about the status of women. We rank 71st in the world in terms of the proportion of women serving in our legislature, with just 16 percent. That's significantly worse not only than the European countries, it's also a poorer showing than Sudan, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and Uzbekistan. According to the Wall Street Journal, women with similar experience and qualifications earn 16 percent less than their male counterparts worldwide; in the United States, the gender "earnings gap" is 22 percent. A study by researchers at the University of California found that women occupied only 11 percent of the seats on corporate boards in the oh-so-progressive state of California and held about one in 12 executive jobs. And, as I've written before, while the American economy has seen enormous benefits from large numbers of women entering the work force, our corporate culture has done far less than just about every other country -- including supposedly "backward" states -- to adapt to today's work force: According to Harvard's Project on Global Working Families, the United States is one of only five countries out of 168 studied that doesn't mandate some form of paid maternal leave. The only other advanced economy among those five was Australia's, where women are guaranteed an entire year of unpaid leave. That puts the United States -- the wealthiest nation on the planet -- in the company of Lesotho, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland. So you may have come a long way, Western Baby, but you're not there yet, or even close. The bottom line here is that increasing women's civic, political and economic participation is a good fight, and an incredibly significant one. Focusing primarily on the status of women in Islamic countries to rid ourselves of the stigma of our own inequalities or to justify Western hegemony over the rest of the world is not.
Karzai Urges More Freedoms for Women By RAHIM FAIEZ – 4 hours ago http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gHu5jQuPq7Ayq6I-VG7LVqJjwtxgD8V97MI00 KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Afghan women need the freedom to pursue more education and should not be forced into marriage, President Hamid Karzai told an audience of women during an International Women's Day ceremony Saturday. Karzai called on men and religious leaders to promote education for females, saying Afghanistan needed more female nurses and doctors. He also called for fewer childhood marriages, a common practice in Afghanistan's countryside. "I call on all religious leaders to advise all the people to stop violence against women, to stop child marriages and forced marriages as well," Karzai told several hundred women gathered in a high school auditorium in Kabul. Karzai also urged Afghan families to stop using young women as currency. Family disputes in Afghanistan — particularly in the more conservative countryside — are sometimes solved by one family giving a daughter to another family. He called for an end to child marriages. "How can a father accept with his heart to marry his 15-year-old child with a 60 year-old-man?" Karzai said. "Again, I call on the people, they shouldn't give their daughters for money, they shouldn't give them to old men, and they shouldn't give them in forced marriages." In the southern city of Kandahar, several hundred women — most wearing the all-encompassing burqa that most women in Afghanistan wear — met at the Kandahar Women's Association headquarters. Rona Tarin, the organization's director, noted the hardships that Afghan women face. "We want to give our message to all the Western women," she said. "Afghan women are facing a lot of problems. Women should have a right to education. We want to work shoulder to shoulder with men." Under the Taliban's 1996-2001 rule, Afghan women could not leave the house without a male relative and were banned from going to school. Although millions of Afghan girls are now in class and women can again walk the streets by themselves, most women still wear a burqa and most do not enjoy the same rights as males. Rovina Jan, a 35-year-old woman who participated in another Women's Day event in Kandahar, said she had to sneak out of the house to attend the program. "A lot of women came down here without permission from their husbands, because we knew if we told the men why we wanted to leave the house, they wouldn't let us," she said.
Iraqi women demand equality, end to violence http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jlLp07w_6qqxtJZG3b5hz9Qs-qdA BAGHDAD (AFP) — Scores of women rallied outside a Baghdad hotel on Saturday demanding an end to violence and equal social status with men as part of the observations of International Women's Day. "Stop neglecting women. Stop killing women. Stop creating widows," read a large banner that the women, from various ethnic and religious backgrounds, held at the Babylon Hotel in Baghdad's central Karada neighbourhood. After the rally, the protesters joined a much larger group that included men and children at a hotel conference room to hear from various speakers. One of the speakers was Nariman Mahmoud Othman, minister for women's rights, who led a delegation of women to the office of the head of Iraq's parliament, Mahmoud Mashhadani, with a list of issues concerning women's rights they wanted to discuss. The list also called for more women to be appointed to positions of power, including ministries and embassies. Another speaker was Maisoon Al-Damloji, a female member of parliament from the secular Iraqia party. "We are united today in our desire to spread the peace in our country," she said. "We reject murder, torture and revenge." Women in Iraq "suffered during Saddam's time and during the embargo, and now are suffering because of sectarian violence," she said. Iraq's constitution reserves 25 percent of the country's 275 seats of parliament for women, though not all are currently filled because in some cases female candidates were unavailable. Orbia Tawfiq, a professor at Baghdad's College of Arts, said "we demand that women be given their rights. They should not be oppressed and they should be treated like human beings. "Women must not be treated as commodities. They must be granted freedom in choosing their husbands and careers," she said. Mohar Abdel Hamid, 38, said that the needs of widows like herself must be addressed. "I hope the government listens to us because women have always suffered in Iraq," she told AFP. A recent report by US-based Women For Women International said the state of Iraqi women since the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq has become a "national crisis." According to the report, released Thursday, 64 percent of the women surveyed said violence against them had increased since the war. "When asked why, respondents most commonly said that there is less respect for women's rights than before, that women are thought of as possessions and that the economy has gotten worse," it said. The report also found that 76 percent of the women interviewed said that girls in their families were forbidden from attending school.
Rallies, Celebrations Mark International Women's Day
By VOA
News People around the world have observed International Women's Day with rallies, speeches and public ceremonies to call attention to women's issues and appeal for change. At a ceremony in Afghanistan Saturday, President Hamid Karzai told a crowd of hundreds of women that they should be free to pursue their education. He called on men and religious leaders to stop forcing young girls into marriage - especially to men several decades older - and to allow them an education. In the Philippines, hundreds of female protesters marked the day with a rally to demand the resignation of President Gloria Arroyo over a corruption scandal. The women marched to the presidential palace in the capital, Manila Saturday, chanting anti-Arroyo slogans and burning an effigy of Ms. Arroyo. Women also celebrated the day with ceremonies in Russia and Iraq. Celebrated on March 8, International Women's Day is the global day recognizing all women around the world and intended to inspire them to achieve their full potential. In many countries it is an official holiday. Some information for this report was provided by AFP, AP and Reuters. Women more equipped with skills 8 Mar, 2008, 0910 hrs IST, TNN
BANGALORE: Women
professionals feel better equipped than their male
counterparts in a variety of skills such as technology
adoption, inclusion and diversity and social
responsibility in a skills readiness index, reveals a
global research by Accenture.
However, what is
significant is that women employees in emerging
markets such as India (70%), China (68%) and Brazil
(58%) felt better equipped to succeed in 2011 compared
to their counterparts in the developed nations.
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UN chief calls for end of violence against women |
|
AP |
UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Drawing attention to violence against women, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has urged nations to invest more spending on job opportunities, health care, nutrition and other pressing needs of women worldwide.
"Investing in women helps us fight all the challenges of our time - from poverty, hunger and illiteracy to environmental degradation and disease, including HIV/AIDS," he said during a meeting of a UN commission on gender equality and advancement of women.
UN
officials have been urging all countries to mark
International Women's Day today with renewed efforts
to end rape, forced prostitution and other violence
against women.
Joanne Sandler, acting director of the UN Development
Fund for Women, has called on member nations to seize
the chance "to break new ground in the struggle for
women's rights" as they mark the annual event.
She described it as an "urgent need to end violence against women in all of its forms".
Assistant Secretary General Kathleen Cravero also has focused on violence against women, urging the UN Security Council to back up an eight-year-old pledge to protect women and girls from rape and sexual abuse during armed conflict with bolder action.
She argued that peaceful societies cannot take shape when half their populations live in fear.
"Rape is a crime and must be stopped," said Cravero, who directs the UN Development Programme's Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery.
'Support and protect our women'
published: Saturday |
March 8, 2008
Golding, Llewellyn
and McKenzie
As the world observes International Women's Day, Prime Minister Bruce Golding has called for the support and protection of women and charged Jamaican men to step forward and shoulder more of the responsibilities within the home and communities.
Golding said Jamaican women must be saluted and regarded with a sense of pride as they play a vital role in our society.
"The women of Jamaica have been called upon to bear an unfair share of the burden in cradling our society, raising our children and providing for our families. They have borne that burden with remarkable strength and resilience and we owe them a mighty debt of gratitude," said Golding.
He added: "The crisis we face in the behaviour of our young men who dominate the incidence of crime and violence, and the disproportionate underperformance of the boys in our schools, point to the absence of male parenting and mentoring in our homes. Our women cannot do it alone. They cannot be left to do it alone."
Pivotal positions
Prime Minister Golding congratulated the achievements of two Jamaican women, who have been appointed to assume the pivotal positions of Director of Public Prosecutions, Paula Llewellyn, and Auditor General, Pamela Munroe-Ellis.
"They achieved their appointments not because they are women, but because of their proven competence and we salute them," the prime minister said.
Hermione McKenzie, president of the Association of Women's Organizations in Jamaica, said it is a day when women globally, pause and evaluate the position of females in the society.
The observance of the day began 30 years ago in Jamaica, having started globally in 1909.
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Mike Ghouse is a Speaker, Thinker, Writer and a Moderator. He is a frequent guest on talk radio and local television network discussing Pluralism, politics, Islam, Religion, Terrorism, India and civic issues. His comments, news analysis, opinions and columns can be found on the Websites and Blogs listed at his personal website www.MikeGhouse.net. He can be reached at MikeGhouse@gmail.com or (214) 325-1916