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Friday, May 20, 2005

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Gender equality still a distant dream

Hasan Suroor

A recent survey by the World Economic Forum finds that full economic and political empowerment remains a dream for millions of women even in the Western world.

IMAGES OF high-profile women running multi-million dollar business empires, calling the shots in politics or taking over traditional male bastions are as misleading in measuring women's status as the depressing stories of their plight and oppression.

The real situation, judging from a new world survey, has more shades of grey than either the women's glossies or the feminist campaigns would have us believe. Indeed, in some areas, women in Third World countries such as India are said to be better off than those in the more advanced nations.

Progress in Nordic states

The survey, published by the Geneva-based World Economic Forum — better known for its annual business bash in Davos — shows that full economic and political empowerment remains a distant dream for millions of women in much of the western world, let alone developing countries. Of the 58 countries covered by the survey, only a handful of European nations — mostly the Nordic states — seem to have made real progress in lowering the glass ceiling, though it still exists even in these countries.

The report says that "no country has yet managed to eliminate the gender gap" but the Nordic states — Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark and Finland — have "succeeded best" in narrowing it.

They are seen to provide a "workable model" for the rest of the world to follow. Other "female-friendly" countries include Britain, Germany, New Zealand, Australia and, significantly, several East European countries where women still benefit from the support system built during the Communist era.

U.S.' poor record

America, with its restrictive maternity rights regime and poor state child welfare system, does not even figure in the top 10 woman-friendly countries. Even Britain, which makes it to the top 10, fares badly in a range of areas, lagging behind even India in terms of economic opportunity.

The most glaring gender inequality in Britain relates to wages where women still earn far less than men for the same work — and this despite an Equal Pay Act passed 30 years ago. This is confirmed by official figures which show that the average income of women in Britain is almost half that of men.

How does India rank in the WEF survey? Despite scoring high in economic opportunity, India is at the bottom of the heap by most criteria — above only Pakistan, Korea, Jordan, Turkey and Egypt.

It is placed at the 53rd position — embarrassingly behind economically less developed countries such as Bangladesh and a host of Latin American and African nations which have done much better in narrowing the gender gap.

"The Indian rhetoric is clearly not matched by the achievement on the ground," commented a British Indian woman rights activist.

Call for strategy review

Although WEF chief economist Augusto Lopez-Claros has said the survey is "not intended as a tool for embarrassing nations, but as a benchmark for improvement," it has already provoked calls for a review of strategies to close the gender gap.

Cherie Blair, wife of the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, has expressed concern over the continuing inequalities faced by women and called for positive discrimination.

In remarks that would find resonance in India, she said she "unequivocally" supported quotas for women in parliamentary elections as a means of "political empowerment."

Saadia Zahidi, a co-author of the WEF survey, says there is a link between how a country treated its women and that country's ability to compete globally. The report underlines the "clear economic incentive" behind empowering women, she points out.

"Countries that do not fully take advantage of one half of the talent in their population are misallocating their human resources and undermining their competitive potential," she said in an interview to mark the launch of the report.

Its findings are based on "hard data" from leading international organisations, and the countries have been ranked on the basis of five main criteria laid down by the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) — economic participation, economic opportunity, political empowerment, educational attainment, and health and well-being.

"Measuring the magnitude of the problem is a first step — we hope that governments and NGOs alike can use the rankings in our study to identify issue-areas and to learn from the experiences of nations that have been more successful in narrowing the gender gap," Ms. Zahidi said.

The WEF stressed that improving educational prospects for women should be the main priority for countries around the world, especially in developing countries. It described opening up education for girls as the "most important catalyst for change in society" and said that progress in other areas such as falling adolescent pregnancy rates and better income opportunities would automatically follow educational empowerment of women.

This is the first time the WEF has attempted such a survey and commentators said it reflected a recognition by the international business community that women's status was an area of critical importance for development.

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