Asian-Pacific Woman no progress in gender equalith

New Delhi: While Asia and the Pacific can take pride in the region’s vibrant economic transformation in recent decades, this has not translated into progress on gender equality.

Discrimination and neglect are threatening women’s very survival in the Asia-Pacific region, where women suffer from some of the world’s lowest rates of political representation, employment and property ownership. Their lack of participation is also depressing economic growth.

Those were some of the findings of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)-sponsored 2010 Asia-Pacific Human Development Report launched on Monday.

“Empowering women is vital for achieving development goals overall, and for boosting economic growth and sustainable development,” said UNDP administrator Helen Clark, in presenting the report, ‘Power, Voice and Rights: A Turning Point for Gender Equality in Asia and the Pacific’, here today.

“Policy needs to advance gender equality, so that women as well as men can benefit from job creation and investments in social infrastructure.”

The report focuses on three key areas — economic power, political decision-making and legal rights to analyse what holds women back, and how policies and attitudes can be changed to foster a climb toward gender equality. Asia, the report asserts, is standing at a cross-road and by putting the right policies in place now, countries in the region can achieve positive change.

Employment and equal payment

Lack of women’s participation in the workforce costs the region billions of dollars every year. In countries such as India, Indonesia and Malaysia conservative estimates show that GDP would increase by up to 2-4 percent annually if women’s employment rates were raised to 70 percent, closer to the rate of many developed countries.

Fewer women than men are in paid work in every country in the region, with striking contrasts between South Asia and East Asia. Nearly 70 percent of East Asian women are in paid work, well above the global average of 53 percent, in countries such as Cambodia, China, and Vietnam, for example. In South Asian countries like India and Pakistan, fewer than 35 percent of women do paid work. These contrasts in women’s paid work between East and South Asia co-exist in parallel with the higher long-term growth trend of the former.

Despite laws guaranteeing equal pay for equal work, women in this region still earn considerably less than men, with the pay gap ranging from 54 to 90 percent. Women “consistently end up with some of the worst, most poorly-paid jobs —often the ones that men don’t want to do, or that are assumed to be “naturally” suited to women,” the report found.

South Asia often comes in second worst in the world in gender equality measures, just above sub-Saharan Africa, while East Asia often fares better in health, education, and employment.

Political representation

Asia-Pacific women hold only a handful of legislative seats, fewer than anywhere else in the world except in the Arab region. Women in Asia-Pacific rarely make it to elective office. The Pacific sub-region accounts for four of the world’s six countries without any women lawmakers.

Development level doesn’t necessarily correlate with high political participation for women, either; women in Japan and the Republic of Korea, for example, hold just 10 percent of legislative seats.

Interestingly, countries emerging from conflict appear to offer better political opportunities for women: 33 percent of Nepal’s parliamentarians are women, and nearly 30 percent of Timor-Leste’s.

Missing girls

The problem of “missing girls” in which more boys are born than girls, as girl foetuses are presumably aborted, and women die from health and nutrition neglect is actually growing. Birth gender disparity is greatest in East Asia, where 119 boys are born for every 100 girls.

China and India together account more than 85 million of the nearly 100 million “missing” women estimated to have died from discriminatory treatment in health care, nutrition access or pure neglect ?or because they were never born in the first place, the report found.

A tenth of women here report being assaulted by their partners, and a majority of women who do work —up to 85 percent of South Asia’s working women are engaged in unstable low-end work in the informal economy.

Few women hold property. Although women predominate in agriculture, they head only 7 percent of farms, compared to 20 percent in most other regions of the world.

“Pervasive gender inequality remains a barrier to progress, justice and social stability, and deprives the region of a significant source of human potential,” the report concluded.

Laws

Laws are not helping much. The region is far behind where it could be on basic issues, such as protecting women from violence, upholding entitlements to property —even allowing people to divorce in an informed and reasonable way.

Few countries have adopted or implemented laws prohibiting violence against women, despite widespread evidence of discrimination and assault. Nearly half of the countries in South Asia, and more than 60 percent of those in the Pacific, have no laws against domestic violence. Nor are there many provisions against sexual harassment in workplaces, though 30 to 40 percent of working women report experiencing verbal, physical or sexual abuse.

“Too often, customs or religious beliefs have become a rationale for laws and legal systems to ignore or soft-peddle or even, in the worst cases, justify issues such as discriminatory inheritance practices and the multiple forms of violence that specifically target women,” Anuradha Rajivan, leader of the multinational team that prepared the report, said.

Many women are also prevented from accessing justice if it involves challenging their husbands, other family members or the broader status quo, the report concluded.

The report has recommended the following steps for redressing the gender imbalance. They are as follows:

Removing barriers to women’s ownership of assets, such as land; expanding paid employment; making migration safe and investing in high-quality education and health are some of the main solutions recommended for addressing these problems.

Reforming constitutions, training judicial and law enforcement personnel in gender-sensitive practices and progressively

Interpreting religious principles which recognise the equal value of all human beings.

Political quotas to increase women’s political participation, with sanctions for non-compliance, could be necessary.

More women should also be enfranchised into party politics; and relied upon as brokers of peace in times of emergency.

ANI

International Woman's Day, Monday March 8th

- The world marks International Women's Day on Monday, an annual celebration that highlights their economic, political and social achievements.

"International Women's Day is the story of ordinary women as makers of history; it is rooted in the centuries-old struggle of women to participate in society on an equal footing with men," the United Nations says.

The day was marked for the first time in the early 1900s. More than 1 million women and men attended rallies in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland in 1911, according to the United Nations. They demanded that women be given the right to vote and to hold public office, and an end to job discrimination.

"It is a time to reflect on progress made, to call for change and to celebrate acts of courage and determination by ordinary women who have played an extraordinary role in the history of women's rights," the United Nations said.

Women for Women International is sponsoring peace demonstrations on bridges in 70 locations. The event will "honor the resilience of millions of women survivors of war around the world" and push for peace instead of armed conflict, the group said.

On a bridge between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo -- countries marred by internal violence -- thousands of women will gather in support of peace and development, the group said.

While a celebration of progress, International Women's Day is also a time to acknowledge the struggles women still grapple with around the globe.

In India, angry protests disrupted the Parliament several times Monday in a bid to thwart a landmark bill that would reserve one-third of the seats in federal and state legislatures for women. While the president is a woman -- Pratibha Devisingh Patil is India's first female president -- women make up just 11 percent of the members of the lower house of the Indian Parliament.

On Saturday, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh vowed to work for greater female representation in the country's democratic process, citing Women's Day as a time to "reaffirm our government's commitment to all-round social, economic and political empowerment of our women."

Half of India's female population cannot read or write, authorities say.

In Iran, female activists were honored Sunday by Zahra Rahnavard, wife of Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Moussavi, in celebration of International Women's Day.

About 30 of Iran's most prominent women's rights activists and their supporters held a private gathering in Tehran. Rahnavard declared that the women's opposition movement was still alive. She said the movement would not forget the sacrifices by women who were jailed, beaten or died in the post-election protests last year. Women, treated as second-class citizens under Iranian law, were noticeably front and center at the massive demonstrations after the disputed election in June.

"This year these women are now much more visible," said Nadya Khalife, a gender equality researcher for Human Rights Watch in Beirut, Lebanon. "But Iranian women are not only battling gender discrimination, they are also battling heightened political tensions."

Gender Equality for Iran, an activist organization, launched a renewed campaign for women's rights to mark International Women's Day, the group said.

The campaign, Call for Solidarity: Freedom and Gender Equality in Iran, is calling for the release of all political prisoners and an end to government-sponsored repression, the group said.