One Utah

Courtesy of UNICEF (via Amanda at pandagon).

It doesn’t get any clearer than this:

World leaders know that human development is stunted by entrenched discrimination and injustice. Yet although 27 years have elapsed since CEDAW was adopted – and despite the fact that the convention has received 184 ratifications, accessions and successions by States parties – millions of women and girls throughout the world remain powerless, voiceless and without rights. The negative consequences of women’s inequality reverberate throughout society.

Or this:

Some nations that readily accept the concept that children have rights are less willing to concede that women also have rights. And while 184 countries are parties to CEDAW, many of the signatures were submitted with reservations to specific articles. In fact, CEDAW contains among the highest number of reservations of any United Nations treaty, underscoring worldwide resistance to women’s rights.

. . . While giving lip service to equality, governments often fail to invest often limited public resources in women and children or to challenge discriminatory customs, attitudes and beliefs.

Too often, legal watchdogs, civil society organizations and the media also shirk their responsibilities when they fail to monitor, publicly scrutinize or hold officials accountable for unfulfilled promises.

UNICEF’s report entitled Women and Children: The Double Dividend of Gender Equity states, repeatedly, that enhancing the status of women benefits children.

Healthy children become healthy adults. I’ve been taught most of my life that when women are relatively confident their children will survive childhood and become adults, they have fewer pregnancies. Pregnancy may be natural, but it is hard a woman’s body. Repeated pregnancies, especially under adverse conditions, can be brutal and too many times fatal to mothers. The report covers maternal mortality rates and they are worrying high in many nations.

The Report’s conclusions boil down to:

. . . promoting gender equality and empowering women – will reap the double dividend of bettering the lives of both women and children. It will also contribute to achieving all the other [Millennium Development] goals, from reducing poverty and hunger to saving children’s lives, improving maternal health, ensuring universal education, combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability, and developing new and innovative partnerships for development.

Consider these quotes:

Healthy, educated and empowered women have healthy, educated and confident daughters and sons. The amount of influence women have over the decisions in the household has been shown to positively impact the nutrition, health care and education of their children.

The interests of children are best served when the dynamic between men and women in the household is based on mutual respect and shared responsibilities, and both mother and father are involved in the care, nurture and support of their children.

A recent study examining the issue of family life from a male perspective revealed that most men aspire to be good fathers and to care for their children. But fathers often receive mixed messages regarding their rights and responsibilities as parents. Existing social and cultural norms can have a strong influence on parents’ levels of involvement with their children. The message that some men internalize is that it is not a father’s place to become heavily involved in the lives of young children.

Every girl and boy is entitled to education, regardless of their social or economic status. Enabling girls to access the intellectual and social benefits of basic education ensures that their rights are protected and fulfilled and greatly enhances the range of life choices available to them as women. Furthermore, girls’ education has profound and long-lasting benefits for families and entire communities. Women with some formal education are more likely to delay marriage and childbirth, ensure their children are immunized, be better informed about their own and their children’s nutritional requirements and adopt improved birth spacing practices. As a result, their children have higher survival rates and tend to be healthier and better nourished. Moreover, in many countries, each additional year of formal education completed by a mother translates into her children remaining in school up to one half year longer than would otherwise be the case

Creating gender equity is good for everyone. Imagine a society in which men and women are equally free of social pressures to conform to predetermined gender roles. I have a number of female friends who woefully admit they like working full time and don’t feel cut out for full time, stay at home motherhood. These women come under great pressure from friends and family to conform to normal genders roles; the effect is constant guilt and ‘supermomism’ – they try to be perfect parents at all times and in the end just wear themselves out. No matter how much they do as parents, these women get the message that if they were real moms who cared about their kids they’d quit their jobs and become stay at home moms. Conversely, I know a number of men who regret giving in to social pressure and not taking or fighting for paternity leave and spending more time nurturing their kids. From the report:

UNICEF’s experience shows that programmes that focus on males provide ways to promote positive gender socialization. Programmes that encourage the participation of both men and women can help to increase communication between the sexes and encourage a more even division of childcare responsibilities. In Viet Nam, for example, UNICEF has mobilized men to promote the use of oral rehydration salts to treat diarrhoea and to increase immunization coverage. Throughout Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, male and female activists are campaigning against gender-based violence. In Uganda and Zimbabwe, UNICEF programmes are attempting to foster the socialization of girls and boys as a means of stemming the spread of HIV/AIDS

As we close in on 2007, the fact that many women in the world live in conditions as it is 1007 is criminal. Women’s inequality negatively affects their children – both male and female. The actual financial cost of providing basic health care and nutrition is tiny compared to price of failing to provide those things.

This entry was posted Wednesday, December 20th, 2006 at 11:26 am and is filed under Bigotry, Economic Exploitation, Economy, Equality, Human Rights, Society, This Blog. Both comments and pings are currently closed.