about the other women

17 Feb 2010 Leave a Comment

by jemelikova in 1

Being here  among thousands of men that are part of military and moreover in a muslim country,  I have to face one important  fact every day:  I am a woman. And this fact is not always considered as a positive one.

I am not a feminist, or at least not an extreme one. But I have to say that being a women is sometimes not easy. Even for me, white European, able to decide about her future and not have to depend on decisions of her closest. Even for me being a woman is sometimes a burden. It makes me think even more about the others. I mean all the other women – probably around 3 000 000 000 that live on the planet and how are they keeping up with their manly focused environment.

Reading about the situation of women around the globe makes me really appreciate what I have and gives me more energy to face the minor acts of humiliation and rare feelings that I am not equal. Because I do not have a penis. And according to some research also 10 grams less of a brain mass.

Some facts from UNDP …

• Women work two-thirds of the world’s working hours, according to the United Nations Millennium Campaign to halve world poverty by the year 2015. The overwhelming majority of the labor that sustains life – growing food, cooking, raising children, caring for the elderly, maintaining a house, hauling water – is done by women, and universally this work is accorded low status and no pay. The ceaseless cycle of labor rarely shows up in economic analyses of a society’s production and value.

• Women earn only 10 percent of the world’s income. Where women work for money, they may be limited to a set of jobs deemed suitable for women – invariably low-pay, low-status positions.

• Women own less than 1 percent of the world’s property. Where laws or customs prevent women from owning land or other productive assets, from getting loans or credit, or from having the right to inheritance or to own their home, they have no assets to leverage for economic stability and cannot invest in their own or thein children’s futures.

• Women make up two-thirds of the estimated 876 million adults worldwide who cannot read or write; and girls make up 60 percent of the 77 million children not attending primary school. Education is among the most important drivers of human development: women who are educated have fewer children than those who are denied schooling (some studies correlate each additional year of education with a 10 percent drop in fertility). They delay their first pregnancies, have healthier children (each additional year of schooling a woman has is associated with a 5 to 10 percent decline in child deaths, according to the United Nations Population Fund) and are far more likely to send their own children to school. Yet where women do not have the discretionary income to invest in thein own or their children’s education, where girls’ education is considered frivolous, and where girls are relied on to contribute labor to the household, they miss this unparalleled opportunity to develop their minds and spirits. Their countries suffer too: the World Bank estimates that nations in South Asia and Africa lose .5 to 1 percent growth in per-capita income per year compared to similar countries where children have greater access to quality, basic education.

In many societies around the world, women never belong wholly to themselves; they are the property of others throughout thein lives. Their physical well-being – health, security and bodily integrity – is often beyond their own control. Where women have no control over money, they cannot choose to get health care for themselves or their children. Where having a large number of children confers status on both men and women – indeed, where childbearing may be the only marker of value available to women – frequent pregnancy and labor can be deadly. World Health Organization data indicates that in Afghanistan and Sierra Leone, for example, a woman’s lifetime chance of dying in childbirth is one in seven; in the United States it is one in 3,418, and in Norway and Switzerland, one in 7,300. In any given year, 15 percent of all pregnant women will face a life-threatening complication, and more than 500,000 – 99 percent of them in the developing world – will die.