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

Vietnamese sweltering on hot summer days - People's Daily Online

Vietnamese sweltering on hot summer days
It was a Wednesday morning in Vietnamese capital city of Hanoi, but instead of noisy and busy, the city's streets were empty with only a few motorbikes and taxicabs passing through.

High temperature, as high as nearly 40 degrees Celsius, drove most of the city's people away from the streets and confined them to the rooms.

"It takes only five minutes to get all sweaty if you go outside," said Ngoc Quynh, a girl working as an office clerk in Hanoi. "I have not experienced such hot days for one or two summers."

According to the weather forecast, a hot spell is lingering in northern parts of Vietnam. The temperature went as high as 42 degrees Celsius in the past few days.

Hot days make people tired, slow people's pace and hurt office efficiency.

"It is too hot. I don't want to work in the office, and I don' t want to cook at home, "said Ngoc Quynh. "It is very hard to fall asleep at night. I stay awake until two o'clock in the morning, all sweaty."

People are responding differently to hot weather. Men complain more than women, and the children suffer most.

In the Hanoi-based National Hospital of Pediatrics, nearly 2,000 children were received within one day on Tuesday. They came with heat stroke or flu.

Doctors at the hospital said children were vulnerable to hot weather, and change of temperature between the air-conditioned room and outside.

Hanoi people spent a whole day waiting for the evening to come. When the night fell, they embraced the happiest time of the day.

Local residents, after being confined indoor for the whole day, came out of their houses and rode motorbikes circling around the city for a breath of fresh air.

In a large square near the city's My Dinh Stadium, many people gathered here in the evening for fun and they wouldn't go home until midnight.

Business booming on hot days

As people don't want to go outside, delivery service becomes hot with the hot weather.

Van Anh did not go home as usual when she finished her office work on Tuesday noon. It was hot and her home was experiencing power cut. Van Anh stayed in the office and asked for fast-food delivery service.

The swimming pools in Hanoi are receiving more customers. The number of swimmers at Hanoi Westlake Water Park doubled in the past weekend compared with normal weekends, reported local newspaper the Young People. The number will go even higher if the park is able to hold more people.

Air-conditioners, fans and refrigerators are selling briskly. According to a local supermarket for home electronics, it doesn't have enough technician to install the air-conditioners in the after-sales service.