Gearing up for International Women's Day 8th March
Education, Politics and Wealth Creation
With a whole three weeks ahead of us before once again International Women's Day comes upon us - here is some background on some of the shift which has been happening in world attitudes about supporting Gender Equality in University Education, amongst Business Executives, in political leadership and women's entitlement to an equal right to employment divvied up amongst the regions of Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean and Western European and 'developed countries'.
Interestingly there is not a great deal of difference in aspiration for women to be able to participate fully in education on an equal footing with men - although the subject areas haven't been disaggregated between the Humanities and Science and engineering. South Africa is touching almost the same support base of enthusiasm as Germany and is ahead of Japan to secure women's equality with men in this arena.
Less promising are some of the figures for support for women's representation in political and business leadership broken down nation by nation- with real time political and business power for women lagging behind in every case the publicly vocalised support for women's equality in education - and their right to access to University level education. And as for women's right to paid employment in the remunerated arena of work - rather than the unremunerated arena of domestic reproduction and contribution into familial labour units - well this languishes in many regions at below 50% of the population.
These figures were gathered four years ago - but provide the latest review for the guardians of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD). The ICPD was instrumental in 1994 a remarkable agreement by 179 governments of the world's nation-states to agree that individual human rights and dignity, including the equal rights of women and girls and universal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights, are a necessary precondition for sustainable development. The ICPD created a series of desirables and actions to accelerate such development by 2015. The graph below helps them to make some judgements on how the world is shaping up in terms of gendered equality in public opinion and support. Some way to go then for the world's women to convert educational gains into political, economic and global recognition of the work they already undertake, and their desire to participate in at every level of society with equality. This graph shows how public opinion, and sector by sector analysis, shows on going resistance to the idea of real time equality for women in public spaces. A quick glance across to the Faith Sectors would reveal even worse disparities across most religious bodies, in most regions of the world.
More ideas for engagement in the coming days.
For more on this see Framework of Actions for the follow-up to the Programme of
from Framework of Actions for the follow-up to the Programme of
