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 the 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 20th. century
was
drawing 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 twenty 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
- even killed.
In
Japan, 1999 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.
Only 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 U.S. the average working
woman earned 15,000 annual dollars in 1990,
whereas
the average man earned 25,000 annual dollars. In Japan the
differential between men and women's
wages
was greater in 1990 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 really
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 1000 microchips a day, at 70
wires per chip.
Without training, women cannot get at the credit, technology and
financial resources needed to improve their lot.
Six out of ten of
the world's
illiterates are women and in 1990 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.
It is worth remembering that in Britain only 7% of top
managers are women. Although Britain was famous for having a woman
Prime Minister 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 last decade in Britain has been a
failure, partly because "women themselves haven't been
allowed to hear about it, so they haven't been able to make
demands. "
Elsewhere
in the world women have found cultural prejudices as hard to
change as political ones. In Japan, for example, women are not
allowed to enter the sacred circle of their national sport -the
sumo
wrestling- because they are considered
"unclean". The
spread
of Islamic fundamentalism has meant the return of the
chadorism
and the loss of many
hard-won freedoms. Hard to believe,
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.
Yet
perhaps we shouldn't spend all of the time complaining. The United
Nations 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:
thirty years ago they weren't even spoken about. |