A vivd quote isn't it? The words of QC Cherie Blair at an awareness raising event organised by the NGO Rights and Humanity in June 05 in London.
Rights and Humanity have published some hard-hitting statistics on their site (www.rightsandhumanity.org) which illustrate why Mrs Blair was indeed right. Here they are:
• Women are twice as likely than men to live in poverty.
• Of the 130 million children not in school, two out of every three are girls.
• Two thirds of the world's 876 million illiterates are women and the number of illiterates is not expected to decrease significantly in the next twenty years.
• Women own an estimated 1-2% of all titled land worldwide. This is a huge problem as realisation of the rights to land and property ownership are essential to enable women to provide for themselves and their children. This in turn is crucial for solving problems that face nations as a whole such as a lack of education, hunger, poverty and poor health.
• Even in Western countries, women do not receive equal pay with men. In France for example, even when matched for job sector, organisation size and region, men at the start of their working lives earn 8.5% more than women. After 5 years of work this gap increases to 26%.
• Women are still not sufficiently assisted to reconcile paid work with their household and family responsibilities. In several countries, including the USA, paid maternity leave is still not a legal requirement.
• Of the 181 countries with national parliaments, there are only 14 where 30% or more of members are women. The United Nations and the Inter-Parliamentary Union consider that parliaments must have women making up at least 30% of members for these women to have an impact on government. Among those countries with less than 30% women in parliament are the United States, France, Italy and the United Kingdom.
• At least 60 million girls are “missing” from the population, presumed to be due to abortion of girl-child foetuses, discriminatory feeding and other practices. This is despite the introduction in some countries of laws banning sex-determination testing and sex-selective abortions.
• Women are now overtaking men in rates of HIV infection. Across the world more than 60% of new HIV infections are in young people aged between 15 and 24, the majority of whom are girls. In Sub-Saharan Africa, women aged 15-24 are three times more likely to have AIDS than their male counterparts and in the US 90% of people under 20 living with HIV/AIDS are women.
• FGM (Female Gential Mutilation or Cutting) is estimated to affect between 100-140 million girls world wide. Some form of the practice has been observed to take place in more than 30 countries, including industrialised nations. In the UK, despite a criminal law prohibiting the practice, guidelines published by the British Medical Association in 2001 estimated that there are as many as 3,000 to 4,000 new cases of FGM every year in this country.
• In Europe more women are killed or injured through domestic violence than by cancer or road accidents.
That last one I was particularly surprised by (saddened not surprised by many of the others). I did not realise that domestic violence in Europe was so widespread.
I can't resist making one small positive comment in the face of those depressing facts. Having been in Australia for almost 1.5 years now I have learnt a lot more about neighbouring New Zealand...including the fact that the country had an amazing record for female leadership. The current prime minister is a woman, Helen Clark. She took over from a previous female leader (of an opposing party) in 1999. There are women in many other top positions in NZ and the country was one of the first to give the vote to women.
