|
Summary
(Not for release before 3 December 2002)
More women than men live in poverty
and the disparity has increased over the past decade,
particularly in developing countries. Reducing the “gender
gap” in health and education reduces individual poverty
and encourages economic growth.
While economic growth and rising incomes reduce gender
inequality, they do not break down all barriers to women’s
social participation and development. There must be specific
action to ensure that social and legal institutions guarantee
women’s equality in basic legal and human rights. Women
need access to or control of land and other resources,
equitable employment and earnings, as well as social and
political participation.
The most obvious and brutal impact of gender bias is in
sexual violence. One woman in three will experience violence
at some time in her life.
Power, nutrition, health and time allocation may be
more important than income in determining the differences
in well-being between men and women. Surveys show that
women work longer hours than men in nearly every country
and that at least one half of women’s total work time is
spent on unpaid work. Much of this work is not included in
national accounting systems. This invisibility translates into
incapacity: what countries do not count, they do not support.
Programmes that reduce gender inequality
can significantly improve individual and household welfare
and national economic growth. If sub-Saharan Africa,
South and West Asia had had the same female-male ratio
in years of schooling that East Asia did in 1960, and
had closed the education gender gap at the rate achieved
by East Asia from 1960 to 1992, their per capita income
could have grown by an additional 0.5 to 0.9 percentage
points per year in sub-Saharan Africa, 1.7 per cent
in South Asia and 2.2 per cent in West Asia.
Improving women’s education helps
reduce fertility and child malnutrition and improve
maternal and child survival. One study found that an
additional year of female education reduced total fertility
by 0.23 births, another that the reduction was 0.32
births.
In countries where girls
are only half as likely to go to school as boys, there are on
average 21 more infant deaths per 1,000 live births than in
countries with no gender gap.
Empowering women is also key to halting the AIDS
epidemic. Today, women represent nearly one half of all
infected adults and 58 per cent of adults infected in hard-hit
sub-Saharan Africa. A study in Zambia revealed that only
11 per cent of the women interviewed believed that a married
woman could ask her husband to use a condom, even if
she knew that he had been visiting sex workers and was
possibly infected.
The global community has developed a serious set of
blueprints for addressing inequality. Their recommendations
are laid out in the Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Programme of
Action of the 1994 International Conference on Population
and Development, and the Platform for Action of the 1995
Fourth World Conference on Women.
| 
