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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 June 2000 Issue No. 486 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 June 2000 Issue No. 486
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Beijing minus five?
By Faiza RadyIt was on an optimistic note that the Fourth International Conference for Women closed in Beijing five years ago, with pledges made to take action against the plight of women worldwide. But to what extent have participant nations fulfilled their promises?
New York City was host last week to a UN-sponsored women's conference labelled "Beijing+5, Women 2000: Gender Equality, Development and Peace for the 21st Century." It was convened to assess governments' progress in dealing with what is termed the feminisation of poverty.
Debate centered around the mind-boggling dilemma: How is woman to improve her lot if she is denied the tools to achieve this aim? These tools have been identified as gender equality, income and literacy.
The most crucial post-Beijing targets include the "increased recognition of gender dimensions of poverty." National governments' recognition of gender equality is essential to eradicate the feminisation of poverty. Women worldwide earn on average slightly more than 50 per cent of what men earn, and according to UN estimates, 70 per cent of the world's impoverished people are women. A determining tenet of poverty, illiteracy is also rampant among women. Two-thirds of the world's 875 million illiterates are women. In South Asia, nearly three in five women are illiterate, and half of all women in Africa and the Arab region are still illiterate.
Plagued by the ongoing aggravation of their condition by the transformation of society and the economy commonly known as "globalisation," even if the South had the political will to redress the feminisation of poverty, it lacks the means to achieve any significant progress. Throttled by declining global raw material prices and unequal terms of trade, countries of the South pay on average more than 100 per cent of their Gross National Product to debt servicing alone. The world's poorest countries owe an estimated $371 billion in external debt and grapple with acute levels of human and environmental distress. Deeply mired in poverty, many African countries and least developed countries currently face worse conditions than at the time of the 1995 International Women's Conference in Beijing.
Northern countries, on the other hand, have sufficient resources to redress structural gender-based inequalities. Accordingly, Beijing+5 was an occasion to assess whether the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) governments' "increased recognition" of the feminisation of poverty has indeed affected legislation and social security policies since Beijing. Featuring most prominently among the OECD countries is the US as the world's sole superpower and self-proclaimed arbitrator of human rights violations across the globe.
According to the rhetoric used by US officials at the New York conference, much has already been accomplished since Beijing and the struggle against the feminisation of poverty remains a priority on the Clinton administration's agenda.
However, over and above the political clamour raised at the much-touted conference, the reality of poor women's lives is far removed from the progress proclaimed by government delegates and UN officials in unison. "The situation of women and girls throughout the world lies in stark contrast with the grand rhetoric of the international community," remarked the London-based human rights organisation Amnesty International.
In the US, feminist groups have struggled since the 1960s to have Congress pass the Equal Rights Amendment, which has yet to see the light of day. Meanwhile, North American women still make 73 cents to the men's dollar, and more than half of all women workers are kept in low-paying sales, clerical and service jobs.
Confining women to menial jobs, however, does not tell the whole story of gender-based wage inequality in the US. "The biggest part of the pay gap can only be explained as the result of discrimination," explained the National Committee on Pay Equity. Despite the pledges made at Beijing and beyond the progressive sloganeering, "equal work for equal pay" remains an elusive dream at this dawn of our third millennium in the richest and most powerful country in the world.
In line with its neo-liberal policies of fiscal austerity and social budget cutbacks, the Clinton administration has been busy slashing benefits since Beijing. The 1996 Welfare Reform Act (WRA), for one, massively cut welfare allocations to the North American poor. Commenting on the implications of the WRA, the National Organisation for Women (NOW) -- the largest US-based feminist NGO -- described the act as the most brutal abdication of US government responsibility for the poor in the country's history. "With one stroke of the pen, Clinton took away assistance from poor single parents, mostly mothers with children," fumed NOW.
Other, less dramatic but highly significant, social budget slashes included cutbacks in precisely the kind of programmes, which the US pledged to implement as part of the Beijing platform. In 1998, the Clinton administration halved its funding to $2 million for a Gender Educational Equity Programme, which aims to eliminate gender bias and encourage girls to enter science and math programmes. Translated, this figure amounts to a 5 cent expenditure for every North American girl, compared to the $3,072 annual pay raise the US Congress granted each of its members during the same year, and the $646,000,000 per day the House allocated to the Pentagon.
In light of this record and given its dismal failure to significantly address the feminisation of poverty, it seems evident that the US ranks high among countries that pay politically expedient lip service to gender equity at international conferences. "The continuing failure to protect women's rights reflects many governments' lack of political will to bring about real change in the lives of women," said Amnesty International.
The situation may be roughly comparable in other OECD nations, like the countries of the European Union (EU). Compared to North American women, European women fare better on the books -- yet legality remains largely cosmetic. Despite the fact that standing EU legislation has stipulated "equal pay for equal work", the pay gap between men and women has remained at approximately the same level since Beijing.
The European Women's Lobby (EWL) -- a feminist NGO -- evaluated progress in the EU and concluded that the European Commission's (EC) policies to address gender-based pay inequalities could only be considered ineffective and minimal -- given the gravity of the situation. In 1998, the unemployment level of women in the EU was estimated at 51 per cent, which is some 20 per cent below men's unemployment. In the EU, as in the US, "equal pay for equal work" has remained elusive.
Despite the EU's official commitment to the Beijing platform and noisy pledges to eradicate the feminisation of poverty, European women are still paid 73 per cent of men's wages for the same job categories. Wage inequality is, however, less flagrant in northern countries with long-standing social democratic traditions like Sweden and Denmark, compared to countries with weaker social legislation like Britain and Greece.
If white European women workers suffer from gender discrimination and unequal pay, immigrant women from the South are handicapped by both gender and race. Facing the worst conditions and the highest levels of unemployment in Europe, women from the South are often forced to work for substandard wages in the sweatshops of the informal sector. Five years after Beijing, nothing much seems to have significantly changed for women workers in the richest countries of the world.
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