Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 27, 1995 TAG: 9508280011
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LOS ANGELES TIME
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
The woman's movement, once the preserve of wealthy Western countries, is spreading to the rest of the world.
``What is so impressive is that most of these women have had to fight against far greater odds in societies where they were totally marginalized, and even the idea of a woman's movement was not accepted,'' said Myra Bovinic, president of the International Center for Research on Women in Washington. ``The way it has mushroomed caught even me by surprise.''
Yet on the eve of the International Conference on Women in Beijing next month, women everywhere fare worse than men by just about all measures, concludes the 1995 U.N. Development Program report.
``Women and men still live in an unequal world,'' said the report. ``While the doors to education and health opportunities have opened rapidly for women, the doors to economic and political opportunities are barely ajar.''
Two decades after the United Nations' first women's conference in Mexico City urged change, economic progress is particularly elusive.
On one hand, women's financial institutions have grown, and with them economic clout. Bangladesh's Grameen Bank, which grants small loans to help destitute women set up micro-enterprises, has 3 million members in 37,000 villages and has inspired imitations in 30 countries. Nearly half of the women who have received Grameen loans are no longer living in poverty, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Likewise, one of the world's largest unions, with 30 million members, is the Self-Employed Women's Association in India. As Asia's first mass women's network, it provides petty vendors, casual laborers, service-sector workers and others with education, a credit union, welfare services, child care and instruction on everything from reproductive rights to widows' benefits.
Yet at the same time, women's salaries lag behind men's in all countries but one - Paraguay - according to the U.S. Commerce Department. Globally, women are growing poorer.
``Poverty has a woman's face,'' said the U.N. Development Program report. ``Of 1.3 billion people in poverty, 70 percent are women.''
Among rural women particularly, the number in poverty exceeds 600 million and is growing by 15 million a year, according to estimates of the International Fund for Agricultural Development in Rome.
The International Center for Research on Women calls it the ``feminization of rural poverty.'' A report from the center places the blame on worldwide economic crises, civil conflicts and natural calamities, in addition to cultural changes that have eroded the extended family system and sparked an increase in single motherhood.
Botswana is widely heralded as Africa's democratic success story, yet the country's laws do not always reflect this. For example, Botswanan law stipulates that husbands collect refunds on income taxes deducted from their wives' paychecks.
And the government denies citizenship to children of Botswanan women who marry foreign men, even if the family lives in Botswana. In contrast, citizenship is automatic to the offspring of Botswanan men married to foreign women, even if they live abroad.
``If women in developed societies still have to fight battles, then women in poor countries have to fight real wars, sometimes over the most basic issues everyone else takes for granted,'' said Selim Jahan, co-author of the U.N. Development Program report.
In Saudi Arabia, women must have written permission from men to travel and are forbidden to drive or show their faces in public. Yet the number of businesswomen registered with the Chamber of Commerce in Riyadh has increased fivefold in five years to 2,000, reports the International Labor Organization. Most of them are in retail or real estate.
As a worldwide average, women are paid 30 percent to 40 percent less than their male counterparts for the same work, the U.N. Development Program said. And women's economic contributions are undervalued or not valued to the tune of $11 trillion a year.
``In virtually every country of the world, women work longer hours than men, yet share less in the economic rewards,'' said Mahbub ul-Haq, the Development Program report's principal author. ``If women's work were accurately reflected in statistics, it would shatter the myth that men are the main breadwinners of the world.''
by CNB