INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY
The best and worst places in the world to be a woman,
On the 101st International Women’s Day, let’s skip across borders. Where are the best, safest places on the planet to be female? Where are the most frightening, miserable and hopeless?
If you judge by what Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Tuesday, Afghanistan is proudly near the top in wretchedness. “Men are fundamental and women are secondary,” the Ulema Council of 150 top Muslim clerics officially declared in its code of conduct and Karzai posted it on his website. I’m surprised he didn’t tweet it. I’m surprised it’s news.
Nevertheless, Afghanistan is not the worst place to be a woman, according to political, educational, jobs and health indicators, the Independent concluded recently in a statistical study. Yemen is. Afghanistan is merely the most dangerous. One wonders why we went to war there. Did we really improve women’s lives? Was this ever our aim?
Going solely by political representation, Rwanda does best with 56.3 per cent of its 80-seat lower house being female.
But it’s not a balanced contest worldwide, with Datablog research from UN Women and the Interparliamentary Union revealing that seven countries have no female representation whatsoever, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, nations that we like to consider allies.
Egypt has all of two women representatives, which suggests the so-called Arab Spring is still wintry for women.
Canada does badly, 40th in the world for women political representatives — one place below little Luxembourg — with 76 of 308 Canadian House of Commons seats going to women. But it’s better than Britain at No. 54, tied with Malawi. And it is much better than the U.S., which stands at No. 78, tied with Turkmenistan, and far below many nations it professes to despise. “Less than one in five parliamentarians in the world today are women,” concludes IPU head Anders P. Johnsson. “It is a worrying statistic at this point of human development and impossible to justify. The political will to change this is simply lacking in most cases.” This is a fact. It hurts. Norway is the best place to become a mother, with maternal mortality at one in 7,600. Afghanistan is the worst, with the Independent reporting that a woman is at least 200 times more likely to die during childbirth than from warfare. Sweden comes first in abortion rights, with abortions available without restriction for the first 18 weeks. El Salvador, the Philippines and Nicaragua all ban abortion, as would the U.S. if a Republican defeated President Barack Obama, and one hopes he won’t. Canada doesn’t do too badly, unless you live in P.E.I., where no abortions are effectively permitted, or New Brunswick, a province that ignores the Canada Health Act and where poor women cannot get an abortion. Women live longest in Japan, perhaps because life is comparatively restful without hope of great success. Only 8 per cent of upper management is female. Danish women only spend 57 more minutes a day on unpaid work than do Danish men, but Mexican women spend a full four hours and 21minutes more. Qatar is a great place for women to attend university. They outnumber men six to one, perhaps to fill the empty hours, because there are few jobs for them when they leave. Saudi Arabia is the only nation to ban women from driving, not that they could afford a car. Saudi women earn an average $7,157 (U.S.) a year, compared with men’s $36,727. It’s hard to draw specific lessons from these numbers but easy to draw wide conclusions. In most of the world, you drew the short straw when you were born female and the unfortunate consequences will range from being forced to live a tiny cramped life to suffering early death.
In Canada, I try to take heart from the fact that we live amid a work in progress. Women only became legal “persons” in 1929, Dr. Henry Morgentaler only won us abortion rights in 1988 and we are still swimming on the surface of a massive sea change in human relations. Women have never had many rights. Now we have some.
But I do not say that it can only get better. In Canada and the U.S., women’s rights are under attack every day. It can get much much worse.
That said, I wave a distant greeting to the “secondary” women of Afghanistan, where the council also declares wife-beating just fine as long as a man has a good sharia reason. Much disgust comes your way, councillors!
On March 8, 2013, we’ll check the numbers again, and rate the worldwide welfare of women’s bodies and souls. hmallick@thestar.ca