26 July - 1 August 2001
Issue No.544
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 26 July - 1 August 2001 Issue No.544 |
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Feminising the revolution
Reem Leila wonders whether new efforts to mainstream gender concerns will change 50 years of socially conscious policy
It has been almost half a century since the July 1952 Revolution exhorted ordinary Egyptians to lift up their heads and throw off the monarchical yoke of oppression. Its legacy is a mixed bag: today, nostalgia for pre- revolution days seems to be on the rise, and detractors are growing more numerous and more vocal. Still, no one would argue that the revolution did not change anything. Yet can that be said for its impact on women?
photo: Antoune Albert
Feminists have often argued that in 1919, and again in 1952, their specific agenda was side-lined under the pretext that the struggle for national liberation had to take precedence over social reform. Women voted for the first time in the parliamentary elections of 1957. Fawziya Abdel-Sattar, professor of law at Cairo University and head of the legislative committee at the National Council on Women (NCW), notes: "The July revolution gave women their political rights. The 1956 Constitution made men and women equal in rights and duties. It gave women the right to vote, and to run in elections. Before the revolution, they did not have those rights."
Almost 50 years on, it seems that more women should be exercising their right to vote; but that brings us back to the complex relationship between women's rights and the development process generally. Tahani El- Gebali, prominent lawyer and women's rights advocate, notes that one of the revolution's greatest achievement was to include women's issues in comprehensive development plans. The 1956 Constitution, asserts El-Gebali, established women's right to employment and education, as well as their political rights. On the other hand, she concedes, "the leaders of the revolution refused the creation of an independent feminist organisation, because they believed this would undermine social solidarity." It was therefore difficult for women to advocate issues that they felt concerned them specifically, although "the revolution did give women a chance to become ministers and ambassadors," El-Gebali adds.
Now, as then, gender inequality often lies at the periphery of policy formulation. This neglect stems partly from decision-makers' reluctance to deal with topics they deem inextricably associated with long-entrenched social norms, religion, or cultural traditions. Government officials also tend to argue that gender issues should be addressed through advocacy, not policy. There is also real ignorance about the nature of gender disparities and the costs of those disparities to people's welfare and countries' prospects for development.
By making gender the province of advocacy, however, the state runs the risk of being side-lined in this important sphere. That is probably where the NCW comes in, along with an increased awareness that, instead of being subsumed within wider developmental concerns, the improvement of women's status could actually spearhead development efforts.
The World Bank "Engendering Development" report, launched last month in cooperation with the NCW, aims to improve understanding of the links among gender issues, public policy, and development, and in so doing to foster a wider interest in and stronger commitment to promoting gender equality. Gender discrimination remains pervasive in many dimensions of life worldwide, the report states, despite considerable advances in gender equality in recent decades. While the nature and extent of the discrimination vary considerably, in no region of the developing world are women equal to men in legal, social, and economic rights. Gender gaps are widespread in access to and control of resources, in economic opportunities, power, and political voice.
According to Farkhonda Hassan, secretary- general of the NCW, women and girls bear the largest and most direct costs of these inequalities. Egypt, she says, is committed to development, and decision-makers are aware that gender equality is not only a fundamental aspect of effective development, but an indicator of sustainability. "There is an improvement in gender equality in Egypt with respect to education, health status, and the labour force, although significant gender disparities still exist," says Hassan, who describes the World Bank report as "an invaluable source of information, which generates knowledge and will help in designing effective strategies." The NCW, however, is establishing its own information centre and developing a database for work on gender issues.
Gender disparities in education, health and work are often greatest among the poor, even if the second half of the 20th century witnessed improvements in the status of women generally, and in gender equality in many developing countries. With few exceptions, female educational levels improved considerably. Primary school enrolment rates rose almost twice as fast among girls as among boys (although it must be remembered that such rates were often abysmally low). "This substantially reduced larger gender gaps in schooling," notes Hassan. Still, despite recent increases in women's access to education, women continue to be limited to certain occupations and are largely excluded, for instance, from high management positions in the public sector.
The timing of the World Bank report is not coincidental, Hassan revealed: it precedes the transfer of $4 million in aid targeted at promoting gender equality in Egypt. According to the report, gender inequalities are detrimental to society at large, affecting the health and well-being of men, women, and children, as well as their ability to improve their lives. In addition to these costs, gender inequalities reduce productivity and therefore obstruct poverty-reduction efforts. Gender inequalities also weaken the country's governance and the effectiveness of its development policies. Identifying and measuring the full extent of these costs are difficult, as the report recognises, but a wealth of evidence from countries around the world demonstrates that societies with large, persistent gender inequalities pay the price in the bitter currency of greater poverty, malnutrition and disease.
Elaine Wolfenson of the World Bank believes that "mothers' illiteracy and lack of schooling directly disadvantage their young children." Lack of education, in other words, translates into poor-quality child care, higher infant and child mortality rates, and malnutrition. Mothers with a better education are more likely to adopt appropriate health-promoting behaviour, such as having young children immunised. In Egypt as elsewhere, "a new generation of women and women's organisations is playing an important role as a force for social, political and economic change. Like women in other parts of the world, women in Egypt are struggling for equal rights within the household, the economy and the political sphere," says Wolfenson. This struggle, however, does not pit one gender against the other; rather, it challenges obstacles to the entire development process. "As women change, by necessity men change with them, and for the better, because the concerns of women in every society bring to the fore issues that concern all societies, such as inclusion, participation, poverty alleviation and modernity," adds Wolfenson.
The toll on human lives is a toll on development, since improving the quality of life is development's ultimate goal. But gender inequalities also impose costs on productivity, efficiency, and economic progress. By hindering the accumulation of human capital in the home and the labour market, and by excluding women or men systematically from access to resources, public services, or productive activities, gender discrimination diminishes an economy's capacity to grow and to raise living standards.
The NCW's members know that putting gender equality goals firmly on the national agenda is not an easy task, since it presupposes the transformation of the institutions involved, and involves such intangibles as institutional culture. "The council, however, is facilitating unprecedented interaction between government officials responsible for drafting national plans and a group of competent women. The two parties meet to weave a gender dimension into the mainstream of development," explains Hassan.
The World Bank report suggests a three- part strategy to promote gender equality, divided into a short- and a long-term plan. In the short term, it advocates institutional reform to establish equal rights and opportunities for women and men, and active policy measures "to redress persistent gender disparities in command over resources and political voice." In the long term, it encourages economic development to strengthen incentives for more equal resources and participation.
Legal, social, and economic rights provide an enabling environment in which women and men can participate productively in society, attain a basic quality of life, and take advantage of the new opportunities that development affords. According to Elizabeth King, one of the report's authors, greater equality in rights is also "consistently and systematically associated with greater gender equality in education, health, and political participation effects, independent of income."
Although economic development tends to promote gender equality, its impact is neither sufficient nor immediate. Recent debates on gender and development have tended to pit growth-oriented approaches to development against rights-based or institutional approaches. Both economic development and institutional change are the key elements of a long-term strategy to promote gender equality. "To achieve our goals and to ensure the inclusion of gender concerns, we are developing gender analysis methodologies by utilising local and foreign research capacities and creating new research links with the country and abroad," says King.
If the July revolution did not deliver on all the promises women hoped it had made, will institutionally oriented efforts make the difference? It may seem that these, like previous endeavours, are top-down strategies that often stop short of the grass roots. Their effectiveness, however, will have to be evaluated a few years down the line.
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