EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN IS KEY TO BETTER WORLD
It’s not only the right thing to do, it also makes economic sense
Against the global scourges of poverty, hunger, war and disease, it would not be quite fair to say that after the unprecedented 15-year global effort undertaken in the master plan of its Millennium Development Goals, the United Nations is now making a sow’s ear out of a silk purse with the successor strategy UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced on Monday.
It’s not that the UN’s new Sustainable Development Goals are unworthy, overly ambitious, unreasonable or unrealistic. It’s not just that the grand design for the world order by the year 2030 is an unwieldy hodgepodge of 17 goals, 69 targets and more than 300 indicators replacing the September, 2000 Millennium Declaration’s more elegant and straightforward eight goals, 16 targets and 48 indicators.
It’s just that there is a much less circuitous and far more certain path forward, illuminated by the overwhelming weight of evidence that the emancipation of women is the most dynamic force for human progress in just about any set of indicators you might want to rely on.
Setting aside the opacity of commitments involving “healthy lives” and the promotion of “peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development,” it’s no small thing that after raucous arguments that have been going on since at least the Rio+20 Summit in 2012, 193 nation states have just now agreed upon a draft blueprint to eradicate poverty everywhere, end hunger everywhere, and shift the world’s economies to sustainable and “modern” forms of energy over the next 15 years.
Especially heartening was an explicit commitment in one of the agreement’s 69 targets calling for immediate action to outlaw at least the nastiest forms of child labour, and to “eradicate forced labour” and “end modern slavery and human trafficking.” The anti-slavery Walk Free Foundation reckons that roughly 36 million people live in slavery of one kind or another: roughly 14 million people in India, more than three million in China, two million in Pakistan, more than a million in Russia, more than a million in Uzbekistan, and so on. Another key target — a Canadian government priority — is a commitment to “eradicate all harmful practices, such as child, early and forced marriage and female genital mutilation.” Just getting language like that in a UN agreement couldn’t have been easy.
Still, what we’re left with is a 29-page document that situates the call to “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls” alongside happy-face vows to “revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development” and categorically impossible, thoroughly not-credible pledges committing the UN’s numerous truncheon states and gangland regimes to “provide access to justice for all” and to “build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.”
It’s not that “gender equality” is necessarily a more important “goal” than traction on climate change, productive employment, decent work, the fostering of innovation, the reduction of equality, or the safety of cities. It’s that women’s emancipation is the way most of these things are achieved. It’s how human progress happens.
The importance of gender equality is not so much an achievable end in itself as the means to achieve most of the economic and social-justice targets the UN purports to be aiming for.
Against just about any human-development indicator you can think of — government corruption, social welfare, public health, arbitrary state power, economic vitality — the best predictors are the data points that mark the status of women.
My friend Lauryn Oates of Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan found evidence for this leaping off the pages during her research with the Afghan government’s Central Statistics Office a couple of years ago. In survey data collected from 13,000 households with 22,000 women and 15,000 children across Afghanistan, from the war-razed Kandahari kill zones to the green and peaceful villages of the north, the single greatest predictor of 80 family conditions (literacy, health, drinking water, nutrition and so on) was the mother’s education.
The wider the gulf in gender equality, “the more likely a country is to be involved in intra- and interstate conflict, to be the first to resort to force in such conflicts, and to resort to higher levels of violence,” Valerie Hudson, a political-science professor at the Bush School of Government at Texas A&M University and co-author of Sex and World Peace, points out. This isn’t because women are better or nicer than men. It’s because women make up about half of humanity, and when women are held back, humanity remains enchained.
In a collaboration between the United Nations Foundation, Nike, the Novo Foundation and the Coalition for Adolescent Girls, an initiative called “The Girl Effect” illustrates the point this way: With a minimum of a 7th Grade education, a girl will marry four years later than otherwise and will bear, on average, two fewer children. If Nigerian women were employed at the same rates as young Nigerian men, the country’s gross domestic product would swell by $13.9 billion annually.
There were great strides made during the term of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.
One great hope back in 2000 was that half the number of people living in extreme poverty could be lifted up; that goal was achieved more than two years ahead of schedule.
But women remain widely overrepresented (nearly 70 per cent) among the poor, and that’s hardly changed at all in 15 years. The Millennium Declaration’s child-mortality and deaths in childbirth objectives haven’t been met, either.
The emancipation of women, the world round, is the most important freedom struggle in human history. Those of us fortunate enough to live in the world’s most privileged countries need to be doing a much greater job of putting our backs into it, and not just because it is the right thing to do. It’s the economically sensible thing to do.
This isn’t because women are better or nicer than men. It’s because women make up about half of humanity, and when women are held back, humanity remains enchained.