Big Gender Gap Persists in South Asia

November 09, 2009

Gender gaps are among the widest in South Asia. Pakistan is ranked at 132, third from the bottom on a list of 134 nations compiled by the World Economic Forum for 2009. The 2009 ranking represents a slip of five places in the Global Gender Gap Index 2009 from 127th spot to 132nd from among 134 countries, showing an "absolute decline relative to its performance in 2008."

The Global Gender Gap Report measures the size of the gender inequality gap in four critical areas:

1. Economic participation and opportunity: Outcomes on salaries, participation levels and access to high-skilled employment

2. Educational attainment: Outcomes on access to basic and higher level education

3. Political empowerment: Outcomes on representation in decision-making structures

4. Health and survival: Outcomes on life expectancy and sex ratio

The country profile of Pakistan shows that it is ranked 132 in economic participation and opportunity, 128 in education attainment and health and survival and 55 in political empowerment. Pakistan’s position was 112 in the year 2006 that declined to 126 in 2007 and then 128 in 2008.

Only Chad and Yemen rank worse than Pakistan this year. This is not a surprise considering one of the lowest female literacy rates in Pakistan. Pakistan's gender gap of 27% in literacy is worse than India's 22%. At overall literacy rate of only 52%, and with more than 50 million people illiterate, Pakistan has one of the lowest overall literacy rates in Asia. The literacy rate for males over 15 years is 63% while that for females is 36% in Pakistan. Only Yemen's literacy gender gap is worse than South Asia's.

In spite of the grim picture painted by the WEF, the status of women in Pakistan, and the rest of South Asia, continues to vary considerably across different classes, regions, and the rural/urban divide due to uneven socioeconomic development and the impact of tribal, feudal, and urban social customs on women's lives. While some women are soaring in the skies as pilots of passenger jets and supersonic fighter planes, others are being buried or burned alive for defying traditions.

Sri Lanka, ranked at 16 ahead of the United States at 31, is the shining exception to the rest of South Asia in terms of gender parity.

Ranked 114, India has fared better than Pakistan. But the WEF survey indicates that India is behind Bangladesh (94) and Nepal (110) - affirming that women in these countries share resources with men more equally than in India. Echoing concerns of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen over female infanticide and 25 million "missing women" in India, the WEF rankings bring out the gender gap on health and survival issues. India's gender gap of 22% in literacy is also among the worst in the world.

India ranks 24 for women's political participation. It stands at 121st position in education gap and 127th place on economic participation gap. On its health gender gap, India ranks dead last at 134th.

"While India, Iran and Pakistan perform very poorly on the economic, education and health subindexes, their overall scores are partially bolstered by relatively good performances on political empowerment," the WEF said.

WEF said close to 300 Indian women die every day during childbirth or of pregnancy-related causes, and the country has the worst sex ratios at birth in the world, ranking 131st on this variable. India holds last place among the BRIC countries on the the WEF gender Index, behind Russia (51), China (60) and Brazil (82).

Of the 25 Muslim nations included in the survey, fourteen rank above India and eleven rank below. Most of the Islamic countries ranking higher than India are located in Central and East Asia.

Overall, Nordic nations offer women the most equal treatment compared to men, with Iceland ranking number one, followed by Finland, Norway and Sweden. Ranked ninth, the Philippines is the only Asian country in the top 10. It has “closed the gender gap on both education and health”, according to the WEF. The UK ranks 15 and the United States at 31.

Clearly, South Asians in general, and Pakistanis in particular, have a long way to go toward achieving any semblance of gender parity. They can definitely look to Sri Lanka for inspiration to close the gender gap.

Here's a video about women literacy in South Asia:

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Riaz Haq said…

The best way to subvert the status quo and spark a revolution is to invest in girl's education, argues Nancy Gibbs in Time magazine:

We know what the birth of a revolution looks like: A student stands before a tank. A fruit seller sets himself on fire. A line of monks link arms in a human chain. Crowds surge, soldiers fire, gusts of rage pull down the monuments of tyrants, and maybe, sometimes, justice rises from the flames.

But sometimes freedom and opportunity slip in through the back door, when a quieter subversion of the status quo unleashes change that is just as revolutionary. This is the tantalizing idea for activists concerned with poverty, with disease, with the rise of violent extremism: if you want to change the world, invest in girls.

In recent years, more development aid than ever before has been directed at women--but that doesn't mean it is reaching the girls who need it. Across much of the developing world, by the time she is 12, a girl is tending house, cooking, cleaning. She eats what's left after the men and boys have eaten; she is less likely to be vaccinated, to see a doctor, to attend school. "If only I can get educated, I will surely be the President," a teenager in rural Malawi tells a researcher, but the odds are against her: Why educate a daughter who will end up working for her in-laws rather than a son who will support you? In sub-Saharan Africa, fewer than 1 in 5 girls make it to secondary school. Nearly half are married by the time they are 18; 1 in 7 across the developing world marries before she is 15. Then she gets pregnant. The leading cause of death for girls 15 to 19 worldwide is not accident or violence or disease; it is complications from pregnancy. Girls under 15 are up to five times as likely to die while having children than are women in their 20s, and their babies are more likely to die as well.......
A more surprising army is being enlisted as well. A new initiative called Girl Up girlup.org aims to mobilize 100,000 American girls to raise money and awareness to fight poverty, sexual violence and child marriage. "This generation of 12-to-18-year-olds are all givers," says executive director Elizabeth Gore, the force of nature behind the ingeniously simple Nothing but Nets campaign to fight malaria, about her new United Nations Foundation enterprise. "They gave after Katrina. They gave after the tsunami and Haiti. More than any earlier generation, they feel they know girls around the world."

February 5, 2011 at 5:32 PM

Riaz Haq said…

Here are some excerpts from a NY Times review of "GREAT SOUL: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India" by Joseph Lelyveld:

Some years ago, the British writer Patrick French visited the Sabarmati ashram on the outskirts of Ahmedabad in the Indian state of Gujarat, the site from which Mahatma Gandhi led his salt march to the sea in 1930. French was so appalled by the noisome state of the latrines that he asked the ashram secretary whose job it was to clean them.

A sweeper woman stopped by for an hour a day, the functionary explained, but afterward things inevitably became filthy again.

But wasn’t it a central tenet of the Mahatma’s teachings that his followers clean up after themselves?

“We all clean the toilets together, on Gandhiji’s birthday,” the secretary answered, “as a symbol to show that we understand his message.”

Gandhi had many messages, some ignored, some misunderstood, some as relevant today as when first enunciated. Most Americans — many middle-class Indians, for that matter — know what they know about the Mahatma from Ben Kingsley’s Academy Award-winning screen portrayal. His was a mesmerizing performance, but the script barely hinted at the bewildering complexity of the real man, who was at the same time an earnest pilgrim and a wily politician, an advocate of celibacy and the architect of satyagraha (truth force), a revivalist, a revolutionary and a social reformer.
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As Lelyveld shows, the outcomes of Gandhi’s campaigns in South Africa were neither clear-cut nor long-lasting: after one, his own supporters beat him bloody because they thought he’d settled too quickly for a compromise with the government. But they taught him how to move the masses — not only middle-class Hindu and Muslim immigrants but the poorest of the poor as well. He had, as he himself said, found his “vocation in life.”

Soon after returning to India in 1915, Gandhi set forth what he called the “four pillars on which the structure of swaraj” — self-rule — “would ever rest”: an unshakable alliance between Hindus and Muslims; universal acceptance of the doctrine of nonviolence, as tenet, not tactic; the transformation of India’s approximately 650,000 villages by spinning and other self-sustaining handicrafts; and an end to the evil concept of untouchability. Lelyveld shrewdly examines Gandhi’s noble but doomed battles to achieve them all.

He made a host of enemies along the way — orthodox Hindus who believed him overly sympathetic to Muslims, Muslims who saw his calls for religious unity as part of a Hindu plot, Britons who thought him a charlatan, radical revolutionaries who believed him a reactionary. But no antagonist was more implacable than Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the brilliant, quick-tempered untouchable leader — still largely unknown in the West — who saw the Mahatma’s nonviolent efforts to eradicate untouchability as a sideshow at best. He even objected to the word Gandhi coined for his people — “Harijans” or “children of God” — as patronizing; he preferred “Dalits,” from the Sanskrit for “crushed,” “broken.”
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Gandhi is still routinely called “the father of the nation” in India, but it is hard to see what remains of him beyond what Lelyveld calls his “nimbus.” His notions about sex and spinning and simple living have long since been abandoned. Hindu-Muslim tension still smolders just beneath the uneasy surface. Untouchability survives, too, and standard-issue polychrome statues of Ambedkar in red tie and double-breasted electric-blue suit now outnumber those of the sparsely clothed Mahatma wherever Dalits are still crowded together.....

March 28, 2011 at 4:42 PM

Riaz Haq said…

As if female genocide and world's most child marriages weren't enough, here's yet another example of rampant misogyny in India:

A 17-year-old Indian girl who was allegedly forced by her father to have sex for money with up to 200 men has described her ordeal to the media.

Police in the southern Indian state of Kerala arrested her father and 29 other people two weeks ago.

The girl said she was raped by her father, starved and forced by him to have sex with other men.

Her father has not made any public comment. Police have vowed to hunt down the men alleged to have paid for sex.

They have despatched special police teams to find up to 70 men she has named and accused of paying to have sex with her. These are said to include contractors, film producers and policemen.

"My father first raped me when my mum was not home. Later he started taking me out to different locations, saying I'll get a chance to act in movies," the girl told a local television channel.

She says that when her mother found out, her father threatened to kill the entire family unless her mother kept silent. Police have arrested the mother for not disclosing a crime.

"The government will not allow anyone to escape the law," Chief Minister Oomen Chandy said.

The girl was finally rescued when other relatives discovered what was going on and informed the police. She is currently in a shelter where she is undergoing treatment for depression, police say.

"We will do whatever we can to bring her back to normal life. She wants to complete schooling and lead a good life," said Dr MK Muneer, the minister for social welfare in the provincial government.

"She says she was raped by 200 men. It is shocking and it freezes your conscience," he said.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/13904670

June 24, 2011 at 8:21 PM

Riaz Haq said…

Americans, too, prefer boys over girls, according to a new Gallup poll:

A new survey has found that almost half of people would prefer to have a baby boy than a baby girl.

48 per cent of respondents admitted they wanted a son more than they wanted a daughter.

By contrast, just 28 per cent said they would rather have a girl, while 26 per cent said they would be content with either sex. The remaining people polled either had no opinion or didn't know what they wanted.

Gallup, which interviewed over 1,000 people across the U.S. for its research, revealed that Americans' preference for a male child today is even stronger that it was in 1941, when just 38 per cent wanted a boy more.

It said that the same poll 70 years ago found that just 38 per cent of people wanted a son more than a daughter,with 24 per cent stating preference for a baby girl.

The organisation found that the age, sex and education levels of respondents all made a difference in what the response was likely to be.

Fifty-four percent of people under 30 said that they would prefer a male child, but those with a university education showed equal results for both sexes.

Its report read: 'It is significant that 18- to 29-year-old Americans are the most likely of any age group to express a preference for a boy because most babies are born to younger adults.

'The impact of the differences between men and women in preferences for the sex of their babies is also potentially important. The data from the U.S. suggest that if it were up to mothers to decide the gender of their children, there would be no tilt toward boys.'

Even political stance made a difference. Republicans were more likely than Democrats to state preference for a male child.

Gallup said that the trend was 'driven partly by the fact that American men are more likely to be Republicans and women are more likely to identify as Democrats.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2007948/How-twice-Americans-prefer-son-daughter.html#ixzz1QFrvWhd9

June 24, 2011 at 8:34 PM

Riaz Haq said…

Here are excepts from a recent Businessweek story titled "On the job in Pakistan: Women":

When Naz Khan became Pakistan’s first female money-market trader 19 years ago, KASB Securities, the Merrill Lynch (BAC) affiliate that had hired her, needed to build a women’s restroom in its Karachi office. By the time Khan left last year to become chief financial officer at Engro Fertilizer, KASB had so many women on staff that “we had to get in line” to use the restroom, she says.
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More of them than ever are finding employment, doing everything from pumping gasoline and serving burgers at McDonald’s (MCD) to running major corporations. About 22 percent of Pakistani females over the age of 10 now work, up from 14 percent a decade ago, government statistics show. Women now hold 78 of the 342 seats in the National Assembly, and in July, Hina Rabbani Khar, 34, became Pakistan’s first female Foreign Minister. “The cultural norms regarding women in the workplace have changed,” says Maheen Rahman, 34, chief executive officer at IGI Funds, which manages some $400 million in assets. Rahman says she plans to keep recruiting more women for her company.

Much of the progress has come because women stay in school longer. More than 42 percent of Pakistan’s 2.6 million high school students last year were girls, up from 30 percent 18 years ago. Women made up about 22 percent of the 68,000 students in Pakistani universities in 1993; today, 47 percent of Pakistan’s 1.1 million university students are women, according to the Higher Education Commission. Half of all MBA graduates hired by Habib Bank, Pakistan’s largest lender, are now women. “Parents are realizing how much better a lifestyle a family can have if girls work,” says Sima Kamil, 54, who oversees 1,400 branches as head of retail banking at Habib. “Every branch I visit has one or two girls from conservative backgrounds,” she says.

There’s still a long way to go. The employment rate for men is triple that for women, and Pakistan’s female literacy rate is just 45 percent, vs. 70 percent for men. In agriculture, where women account for three-fourths of all workers, female laborers such as cotton and chili pickers earn less than 50¢ a day. In the informal manufacturing sector—companies that make, say, blouses, bedsheets, or soccer balls—women make up 57 percent of the workforce, but they spend more hours on the job and receive lower pay than their male counterparts, according to the Pakistan Institute of Labour and Economic Research. In 2009, the agency says, women in light manufacturing earned an average of 2,912 rupees ($34) monthly, about 40 percent of the average earnings for men.
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Some companies believe hiring women gives them a competitive advantage. Habib Bank says adding female tellers has helped improve customer service at the formerly state-owned lender because the men on staff don’t want to appear rude in front of women. And makers of household products say female staffers help them better understand the needs of their customers. “The buyers for almost all our product ranges are women,” says Fariyha Subhani, 46, CEO of Unilever Pakistan Foods, where 106 of the 872 employees are women. “Having women selling those products makes sense because they themselves are the consumers,” she says.

To attract more women, Unilever last year offered some employees the option to work from home, and the company has run an on-site day-care center since 2003. Engro, which has 100 women in management positions, last year introduced flexible working hours, a day-care center, and a support group where female employees can discuss challenges they encounter. “Today there is more of a focus at companies on diversity,” says Engro Fertilizer CFO Khan, 42. The next step, she says, is ensuring that “more women can reach senior management levels.”

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/now-on-the-job-in-pakistan-women-09082011.html

September 10, 2011 at 1:56 PM

Riaz Haq said…

Here's a NY Times blog post on brutal rape and death of a woman on a New Delhi bus:

The woman, who has not been identified, has become of a symbol for the treatment of women in India, where rape is common and conviction rates for the crime are low. She boarded a bus with a male friend after watching a movie at a mall, and was raped and attacked with an iron rod by the men on the bus, who the police later said had been drinking and were on a “joy ride.”

She died Saturday morning in Singapore, where she had been flown for treatment after suffering severe internal injuries during the assault. She had an infection in her lungs and abdomen, liver damage and a brain injury, the Singapore hospital said, and died from organ failure. Her body was flown back to India on Saturday.

As news of her death spread Saturday, India’s young, social-network-savvy population began to organize protests and candlelight vigils from Cochin in Kerala to the outsourcing hub of Bangalore to the country’s capital. Just a tiny sliver of India’s population can afford a computer or has access to the Internet, but the young, educated part of this group has become increasingly galvanized over the Delhi rape case. ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/world/asia/india-rape-delhi.html?_r=0
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Here's Reuters' story on the rape incident:

India is angry. India is protesting. Rallies continue in New Delhi after the gang rape of a 23-year-old girl on Dec. 16. The rapes continue too. On Wednesday night, three men reportedly raped a 42-year-old woman and dumped her in South Delhi. There are more cases being reported every day.

The biggest story in India, however, is Abhijit Mukherjee’s comment about the Delhi protests — “These pretty women, dented and painted, who come for protests are not students. I have seen them speak on television, usually women of this age are not students”. He added that students, who go to discotheques, think it is a fashion statement to hold candles and protest.
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Are such comments by lawmakers rare? Why are we so sensitive to something that anyone, anywhere in India says? There were similar reactions when Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi called Human Resource Development Minister Shashi Tharoor’s wife a 50-crore-rupee girlfriend. A few days ago, Sanjay Nirupam’s comment about a fellow politician — Till some time ago you were dancing on the TV screens and now you have become a psephologist — freaked people out. And let’s not forget the case of the impromptu “theek hai?” on the part of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh earlier this week. It threatened to become bigger than “mission accomplished.”

http://blogs.reuters.com/india/2012/12/27/abhijit-mukherjees-foot-in-mukh-moment-steals-spotlight-from-rape-cases/

December 29, 2012 at 9:08 AM

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