1. Current Status of the World's Women and Girls

Map of Botswana - Source: Wikipedia A Centenary of Celebrations? Emmanuel Botlhale Botswana Gazzette - 16 March 2011 Credit: The Botswana Gazette (Dr Emmanuel Botlhale) Reprinted with Permission On 8 March 2011, Botswana joined the rest of the world in celebrating the International Women's Day (IWD). This year's IWD is special; it is the 100th. Naturally, one would like to look back and ask, ‘do we have reason to celebrate?' Amongst numerous variables, we chose to focus on women's economic rights; thus, ‘has Botswana achieved gender equality in resource allocation?' To usefully digress, the celebration of the IWD is traceable to 1908 when 15,000 women marched in New York City demanding, amongst other things, shorter working hours and better wages. The crusade got impetus in 1910 when the IWD was adopted at the International Conference of Working Women that was held in Copenhagen. Notably, the IWD was conceived during a period when women were not part of the development planning trajectory; they were invisible in resource allocation exercises (Young, 2003). Instructively, even during the 1st UN Decade of Development [1960-1970], they were invisible, hence, this led to women conferences; the first was held in Mexico City in 1975. The theme was Equality, Development and Peace and 1975 was declared the International Year of Women. Other women's conferences followed: 2nd (1980; Copenhagen), 3rd (1985; Nairobi) and 4th (1995; Beijing). Subsequent to the conferences, some conventions were born: e.g., the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Commonwealth Plan of Action (2000-5). Mainstream literature [e.g., Young, 1993; UN, 2001, UNFPA (2006), Jain, 2005, Diop, 2005 etc] holds that, generally, there is a disconnect between intention and outcome; i.e., gender interventions have not resulted in improved women's welfare. All the same, there have been improvements, particularly in political representation (see Mmegi, 09/03/10 – Botswana records progress in gender equality). Botswana, likewise, has jumped into the bandwagon and, therefore, signed and ratified national [e.g., 1997's National Policy on Women and Development], regional [e.g., 1997's SADC Gender and Development Declaration) and international (e.g., 1996's ratification of CEDAW) gender-levelling instruments. Although the official position is that the country has posted gender gains (e.g., Mmegi, 09/03/10; BOPA, 12/03/08 -- Mogae calls for gender equity), challenges remain; e.g., failure to set a 30 per cent quota for women representation in local authorities, party structures and National Assembly by the year 2005. To end, according to the SADC Gender Protocol 2010 Barometer, Botswana scored 55% in the gender score card (Gender Links, 2010). Certainly, 55% is a very low score; unquestionably, we can, and should, do better. Thus, as we celebrate the 100th IWD, there is a need to re-examine our commitment to the gender cause. Hence, we must ratify the SADC Gender and Development Protocol that we demurred to ratify arguing that ‘we are uncomfortable with a lot of things in the document' and that ‘the document is full of such expressions as the parties shall, we shall amend the laws and we know that in our country there is only one authority which can amend the law. And that is Parliament (Robert 2008:8).'

Egypt's Revolution Through the Eyes of Five Women, Bill Law, BBC News, 13 April 2011 Reprinted with Permission The Egyptian revolution did not occur out of the blue. Activists, male and female, have for years been pushing for change. Here, five women who helped to shape and define the revolution - a young blogger, the daughter of a powerful Muslim Brother, a Coptic Christian doctor, a persecuted democracy activist and a labour organiser - explain what it means to them. CLICK ON THE IMAGE Celebrations in Tahrir Square after Omar Suleiman's statement announcing Hosni Mubarak's resignation. Source: Wikipedia Dalia Ziada fears that some of the gains of Tahrir Square are already being lost When I first met Dalia she was a wide-eyed cyber activist determined to use her blogs to secure rights for all Egyptians but especially for women. Now, three years on, she is a veteran blogosphere campaigner. But it was when she was in Tahrir Square standing shoulder to shoulder with a poor, uneducated woman that she realised she was part of something bigger. "I asked this woman why she had come and she said 'for change', and then I knew the revolution had begun." But disillusionment has set in. "During the revolution, it didn't matter if you were young or old, a man or a woman. The only thing that mattered was that you were Egyptian. "Now we are back to our differences, you are a man, you are a woman, we are told we should not be mingling, and not talk about everything as before." "It brings disappointment and fear to my heart, actually." Zaahra al-Shatter, daughter of a Muslim Brother, demonstrated daily on Tahrir Square The last time I saw Zaahra, a mother of three, was in March 2008. A school administrator, she had just seen her father and husband - both members of the then banned Muslim Brotherhood - seized in a night raid. She was resolute in her determination to fight for their release, petitioning the government relentlessly, and appealing to the media. Now they are out, she has shifted her energies to education: "The greatest thing about this revolution is that it has given the children of Egypt hope and freedom." She says she is "encouraging the children to think in a different way, to do different projects, to believe in different values. It is very important." Dr. Mona Mina still fights for better health provision, as well as the political revolution Mona Mina, a Christian, is the leader of an organisation called Doctors Without Rights. For years she has fought for better pay and working conditions for doctors. Under President Mubarak, repression and corruption made that an unwinnable fight. Now she is seizing the opportunity. She was at Tahrir Square, but she worries that the revolution could be stolen, that the old ways will simply find new ways to reassert themselves. "The feeling of liberation has started, but it is not complete yet. It's the first step in a long road, there are still many things that need to happen for real liberation." And she says that she and the other Tahrir Square protesters will, if necessary, "shed blood to keep the revolution alive." Gameela Ismail will run for parliament this time Gameela Ismail was a popular television presenter, when she and her then husband Ayman Nour openly challenged Hosni Mubarak. Ayman Nour ran for president and lost. He was stripped of parliamentary immunity and thrown in jail. The couple's bank accounts were frozen. Gameela was sacked from her job and subjected to years of harassment as she campaigned for his release. She is proud of what Egyptians have accomplished, comparing it to the fall of the Berlin Wall. "We made a revolution on our own - the people of Egypt owe no-one." And now, "for the first time, it's our country, not their [the regime's] country. "Walking in the streets now is completely different to before, the feeling that for the first time the street is yours, the neighbourhood is yours, the country is yours." Gameela is running for parliament in the elections scheduled for later this year. Ayesha Abdul Aziz hopes to continue her fight for better schools and hospitals Ayesha is a farmer in the Nile Delta and a labour organiser. In her household unmarried Ayesha sits at the head of the table. In this and in so many other ways she is different from most rural women. In 2008, she led a strike to win equal pay for female tobacco factory workers. She won that fight against the odds. But last year she lost an attempt win a seat in parliament, in blatantly rigged elections. She will run again in the elections scheduled for later this year. Win or lose, she will fight for better schools, better hospitals, for decent roads and clean water. "I am a woman and thank God I know my rights." But she does not think that a woman will ever become president of Egypt. "No, no, no, that is not an issue for me. Egypt is so tough, it really needs a man to run it."

5. UN Women and the WomenWatch Web Site

UN Women and the WomenWatch Web Site CLICK ON THE IMAGE Information and Resources on Gender Equality and Empowerment of Women WomenWatch Special Features International Women's Day 8 March 2011 Equal access to education, training and science and technology: Pathway to decent work for women Gender Equality and Trade Policy Gender Equality and Sustainable Urbanisation Women, Gender Equality and Climate Change UN resources on the gender perspectives of the financial crisis International Day of Rural Women 15 October The International Day of Rural Women directs attention to both the contribution that women make in rural areas, and the many challenges that they face. Women with Disabilities Portal to resources and the work of the United Nations on women with disabilities Women and Peace and Security Implementation of Security Council Resolution 1325 Beijing at 15 Review and Appraisal of the implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action; Women in Leadership Roles, etc. A Tribute to Angela E.V. King A champion for gender equality and women's human rights within the UN and around the world. Gender Equality and ICT A WomenWatch feature to mark the World Summit on the Information Society 2005

Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security: Dignifying Relationships from Love, Sex, and Parenthood to World Affairs Foreword by Archbishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu Evelin Lindner, HumanDHS, 2010 Source: Evelin Lindner The Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security book is being "highly recommended" by Choice as follows (in July 2010): "In this far-ranging, sometimes brilliant book, Lindner (Columbia Univ. and Oslo Univ.) studies the social and political ramifications of human violations and world crises related to humiliation, defined as the enforced lowering of a person or group, a process of subjugation that harms or removes the dignity, pride, and honor of the other. A "transdisciplinary social scientist," the author charts how humiliation--and its antidote, love--are conditioned by large-scale, systemic social forces such as globalization. The force of this book resides in its construction of a compelling, compassionate alternative to the psychological effects of humiliation on gender and sexual relations, parenthood, and leadership. For Lindner, this alternative is not only love but also its psychological correlate, humility, both of which can become the basis of the social, political, and cultural change necessary to reform the harmful global tendency toward humiliation. Lindner's philosophy is avowedly non-dualist and rooted in ancient Eastern wisdom. A powerful follow up to her Making Enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict (CH, March 2007, 44-4114), this book appears in the "Contemporary Psychology" series; it will be indispensable for psychologists, humanists, and political scientists and invaluable to policy makers. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. -- M. Uebel, University of Texas" (Choice is a publication of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), a division of the American Library Association)

Plight of Japanese astronaut, husband illustrate need for gender equality Chikako Kobayashi, The Mainichi Daily News, Japan, 19 April 2011 Copyright 2011 The Mainichi Newspapers. Republished with permission. This article originally appeared in The Mainichi Daily News In commemoration of International Women's Day (IWD) on March 8, Japanese astronaut Naoko Yamazaki and her husband, Taichi, shared the struggles they faced as a family in the years leading up to Naoko's mission on the space shuttle Discovery in spring 2010 to a packed auditorium in Tokyo. Most striking about their recent talk, part of a UN symposium entitled "Josei ga chikyu o genki ni suru" (Women make Earth a vibrant place), was that the insufficiency of the current measures being taken toward gender equality was underscored by the experiences of a couple in which a woman's career was pursued at the expense of her husband's. Asked what he has been up to since he and his family moved back to Japan last December, Taichi -- himself an aerospace engineer, an entrepreneur heading space-technology companies and Naoko Yamazaki Source: Wikipedia organizations, as well as a stay-at-home dad -- said that the family was still living among unpacked boxes. "It'll probably be about a year before we're settled," Taichi said. The past decade has been a trying one for the Yamazaki family. Naoko and Taichi married, had a daughter, traveled extensively -- for astronaut training in Naoko's case, and to raise their daughter in the U.S. and take care of his ailing parents in Japan in Taichi's, made countless other sacrifices, and narrowly avoided divorce. Like many people, Naoko wanted to create the right balance between family and career. "Looking into astronauts' workloads, I figured that as long as my first two years of training were completed before I became pregnant, I could follow through with my training." As it turned out, however, carrying out her plan was much harder for her family than she'd expected. After Naoko took maternity leave from the National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA) -- which has since been merged with two other organizations to form the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) -- to give birth to their daughter, she and Taichi took turns on childcare leave. Taichi found himself extremely isolated as a stay-at-home-parent, as most of the homemakers he knew were women and he felt that any grievances he voiced about his wife and her job would turn the women against him. It was around this time that Naoko left for Russia for training. Taichi credited his employer and colleagues for making it possible for him to continue working full time for a NASDA subcontractor, raise their young daughter, and help care for his elderly parents during this time. "It was like I was taking care of three children, and the person I wanted to lean on -- my wife -- was away," Taichi said. "If it hadn't been for the support of my colleagues, I would've died." Naoko's employer, meanwhile, suggested that the couple was free to make their own choices, albeit none that would allow her to simultaneously pursue her career and spend more time with her family. "They would say, 'Sure, you can dedicate yourself to your family, but that means you won't go on a space mission,'" Taichi said. "I was stuck in the middle," Naoko said. "I would be attacked from this side (family) and when I tried to consult with my employers, they told me these were problems that should be dealt within the family." So how did Naoko deal with it? "I constantly apologized," Naoko said. "I wasn't the only one, though. A male colleague of mine once told me that he apologized to his family for everything that went wrong to make up for pursuing his career -- whether it rained, the dog barked, or a meal tasted awful, he took the blame." Upon arriving in Houston, Texas, for Naoko's training at NASA, the Yamazakis were struck by the support provided to families by the U.S. space agency. "They had an entire department dedicated to caring for astronauts' families," Naoko said. "It wasn't based on purely altruistic motivations -- it was based on the understanding that a stable family life would improve astronaut productivity." "There was no such support when we were in Japan," Taichi added. "Here, if we were to come down with a cold and give it to Naoko, we would've been blamed for interfering with an important state project." Taichi had quit his job in Japan after months of trying unsuccessfully to negotiate a way to keep it while he was in the U.S., and he could not acquire a new job because of his visa status as the spouse of a diplomatic visa holder. "My wife would go to work, our daughter would go to daycare, and I'd find myself at home wondering what in the world I was doing." It was not that Naoko had neglected her family altogether, however. At one point, she was left alone with her daughter in the U.S. while Taichi was in Japan to take care of his parents. "I would train all day, sometimes early in the morning or late at night, and wake up at around 3 a.m. to do housework," Naoko said. "I constantly kept some water trickling from the faucet so that if I were to have a brain hemorrhage, my daughter would at least be able to drink some water." Taichi, however, still resented having to put his career on hold while Naoko moved forward with hers. Feeling as if the only way he would be freed from his burdens was death or divorce, Taichi suggested that the couple seek court mediation. Things started to change after they began discussions under the guidance of an objective third party. Naoko said she started to reconcile with the possibility that she may never make it to space, which gave her a certain level-headedness that helped her to see her husband's side of the story. Talk moderator Keiko Hamada, the deputy editor of weekly magazine Aera, pointed out that the hardships of wives (and a husband, in the case of Chiaki Mukai, the first Japanese woman in space) and other family members of Japanese astronauts had heretofore been relatively unknown. "It is because traditional gender roles were reversed in your case and you have spoken up, that we've come to learn how grueling the experience can be," she said. "I think your situation is not unlike what many families of those employed by private corporations go through, including the mentality that sacrificing the family for work is unavoidable. "The messages that working women have tried to communicate may be more accessible to men when the message comes from men such as yourself, Taichi, and for that, I am grateful." For years, women have been expected to tolerate circumstances similar to the one that made Taichi resentful toward Naoko's pursuit of her dream. While we've come a long way in the 100 years since International Women's Day was first observed in Europe, that it takes the voice of a man to convince society of the questionability of such expectations shows we still have a ways to go.

Rising Tide: Gender equality and cultural change around the world Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris Cambridge University Press, 2003, 226 pages "The twentieth century gave rise to profound changes in traditional sex roles. However, the force of this rising tide has varied among rich and poor societies around the globe, as well as among younger and older generations. Rising Tide sets out to understand how modernization has changed cultural attitudes towards gender equality and to analyze the political consequences of this process. The core argument suggests that women and men's lives have been altered in a two-stage modernization process consisting of (i) the shift from agrarian to industrialized societies and (ii) the move from industrial towards post industrial societies. This book is the first to systematically compare attitudes towards gender equality worldwide, comparing almost 70 nations that run the gamut from rich to poor, agrarian to postindustrial. Rising Tide is essential reading for those interested in understanding issues of comparative politics, public opinion, political behavior, political development, and political sociology." SAMPLE OF RECENT NEWS ABOUT THE RISING TIDE: East Asia May Get its First Woman President, Dennis Engbarth, IPS, 3 May 2011. Arab International Women's Forum commemorates 10th anniversary, Zawya, 2 May 2011. Fight poverty, invest in girls, UNESCO Bangkok Press, Bangkok, Thailand, 2 May 2011. WROC gets award for the elimination of gender-based violence, Lionel Rookwood, Jamaica Observer, 2 May 2011. Raufa Hassan, precious philanthropist dies at 53, Zaid al-Alaya’a, The Yemen Observer, 30 April 2011. Asia's 734M women vital economic bloc, Bernice Camille V. Bauzon, The Manila Times, Philippines, 30 April 2011. Losses Related To Gender Bias, The Sunday Leader, Sri Lanka, 30 April 2011. Women Role Models in the Digital Age, Cheryl Miller, Zen Digital, Brussels, 29 April 2011. Asia has the chance to tackle gender inequality in labor, ADB, 29 April 2011. Gender head on Malawi’s progress, Frazer Potani, Africa News, Lilongwe, Malawi, 28 April 2011. Recession Seen Taking Toll on Gender Equality, New York Times, 26 April 2011. Female Film Roles Still Secondary, According to New Study, ABC News, USA, 22 April 2011. Women Key to Greening the Economy, Aline Cunico, IPS, 22 April 2011. Gender Inequality Persists Behind Closed Doors, IPS, Havana, Cuba, 20 April 2011. African Women Meet Over Gender Equality, Empowerment, All Africa News, Harare, Zimbabwe, 12 April 2011. Panel of experts to undertake 'gender equality audit' of defence force, The Australian, 12 April 2011. Mullahs in Bangladesh clash with police over gender equality rules, AHN, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 5 April 2011.

Social Europe: equal treatment between women and men Source: European Commission Also available at YouTube