Women's Rights

The term "women's rights" emerged in connection with the feminist movement to focus attention on the unequal treatment of women in the public sphere. Women demanded equal civil, political, and economic rights and have fought for the expansion of the human rights framework to claim rights of bodily integrity for women (for example, the right to decide on such issues as abortion).

The notion of individual rights stems from eighteenth-century Western political thought and helped prepare the grounds for the American and French Revolutions. New laws defined the rights of the new citizens according to their gender, race, and class. Only male, white property owners had the right to vote and run for office, and the right to own property largely was limited to white males. Personal law defined women and men as fundamentally different, and men had final decision in matters relating to family and economic maintenance.

Demands for women's equal rights arose in the nineteenth century as part of a broader struggle to democratize Western societies in parallel with the fight against slavery and the struggle for workers' rights. By the end of the century, the main preoccupation of this first wave of the women's movement became the right to vote. In territories colonized by Europeans, women demanded equal rights together with independence from colonial rule. They participated in nationalist movements and insisted on the modernization of their own societies and rights of full citizenship for women.

In the second half of the twentieth century feminist activism sought to move beyond formal rights of political equality to eliminate pervasive discrimination entrenched in culture and society. Feminists fought for women's political and economic rights around the world. The United Nations (UN) declared an International Women's Year in 1975 and a decade for women from 1976 to 1985. It organized three world conferences (Mexico City, 1975; Copenhagen, 1980; Nairobi, 1985) that developed plans and strategies to advance the status of women globally and a follow-up conference in 1995 (Beijing) to assess progress and make concrete commitments. In 1979, the UN adopted a treaty, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which condemns discrimination and commits states to fight discrimination in political and public life, education, employment, and health care. Furthermore, states agreed to accord women equality with men before the law in civil matters, marriage, and family relations.

political rights

The demands of the early feminist movement focused on civil and political rights, particularly on the right to vote and stand for election. In many countries (Australia, Canada, Soviet Union, the Scandinavian states, Germany) women gained suffrage rights by the end of World War I (1914–1918), but the biggest surge in voting rights (for both women and men) came with decolonization in the late 1950s. In the early twenty-first century, there remained few countries in which women do not have voting rights. They included Saudi Arabia and countries such as Oman, Qatar, and Brunei, which do not have parliaments and where neither men nor women vote.

Although women formally have equal political rights in most countries, their representation in parliaments and governments is far below their proportion in the population. In the vast majority of countries, women hold less than 20 percent of seats in parliaments (with a global average of 15.2% in 2003) and less than 20 percent of ministerial positions, and female heads of government are still a rarity. The level of women's participation is increasing slowly. Most of the increase has been in wealthier countries, but wealth is not the main predictor of women's political participation. For example, at least thirteen countries in sub-Saharan Africa, a part of the world with considerable economic problems, have higher rates of women in parliament than France, Japan, and the United States.

The most effective tool for increasing the number of women in politics is the implementation of special measures such as quotas. For example, the elimination of quotas led to a steep drop in women's representation in the parliaments of countries transitioning from communism to some type of democratic representation. In contrast, more than twenty-five countries, among them many Latin American countries, have adopted quotas to increase the proportion of women in their parliaments, and have done so with considerable success. As a result of introducing quotas, both Argentina and Costa Rica now range among the few (otherwise Northern European) countries with more than 30 percent women in parliaments. Voting systems also make a difference: Countries with systems of proportional representation , where candidates run on party lists, tend to elect more women than those with majoritarian systems (such as the United States), where candidates compete in defined districts and the winner takes all.

civil rights

Women's rights in civil matters, in particular in marriage and family law, are much more contested than women's political rights. Civil rights include the rights to contract, hold property, to be treated equally in the courts, and to freely choose a residence or domicile. They also include equal rights to enter marriage and freely choose a spouse, the same rights and responsibilities during marriage and at its dissolution, the same rights in matters relating to children, and the same rights in acquiring, administering, enjoying and disposing of property. In many countries (e.g., India), religious or customary law guides these matters and frequently denies women equal rights. Most Islamic countries (e.g. Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia) govern marriage and family relations through Shari'a, or Islamic law, which operates on the premise that men have guardianship over women and, as a result, sanctions many inequalities. For example, a man may take up to four wives and divorce any of them at will. In contrast, a woman can only be married to one man at a time and can gain a divorce only through a judicial ruling on limited grounds. A wife is required to obey her husband and, if she is judged disobedient, loses her entitlement to maintenance. Her husband can prevent her from taking employment, and if she escapes a violent home, she can be forced to return. Although some Islamic countries have ratified the CEDAW treaty, they have entered reservations regarding paragraphs incompatible with Shari'a.

Another significant area of concern is laws on nationality. In some countries, women who marry a foreigner are not able to pass on their nationality, whereas men can. This significantly impacts their mobility and their right to choose where to live. Furthermore, women do not always have the same right as men to pass on nationality to their children. For example, in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Egypt, the law stipulates that children from a marriage between a female national and a foreigner take on the father's nationality. This again curtails the ability of women to freely establish residence with their children.

A final area of concern is property ownership and inheritance. In many countries in Africa in particular, customary law denies women rights with regard to communal or clan property. In addition, property acquired by the spouses often belongs to the husband on dissolution of the marriage. In many countries women have no right to inherit or their claims are treated as subordinate to that of male kin. As a result, women rarely own land in societies heavily dominated by agriculture where lack of access to land often is a key cause of poverty.

economic rights

Women's economic rights pertain in particular to their treatment in the labor market. Although poor rural and working-class women always have worked, the idea that women are under the guardianship, or coverture, of men has informed laws that have restricted women's right to work. In the early twentieth century, this took the form of "protective legislation." This type of legislation considered all women to be mothers or potential mothers and therefore vulnerable and in need of protection. Laws and international conventions prohibited women from working at night, underground, or with dangerous substances (such as phosphorus) because this was considered harmful to the female body or against public mores . Furthermore, women earned less than men for the same work, a practice sanctioned by governments' minimum wage scales and collective bargaining agreements between unions and employers.

Since the 1950s, the principles of equal pay and equal treatment increasingly have come to dominate international instruments and national laws. In 1951 the International Labour Organization passed an equal pay convention, and in 1981 a convention on equal opportunities and equal treatment for men and women workers. For the most part laws limiting women's right to work have been repealed. Although CEDAW has confirmed the rights to equal pay, equal treatment, and maternity protection, these rights are far from being realized.

Women's access to nonagricultural employment is about the same as men's in developed countries, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. But there is a large employment gap in other areas of the world. Women's labor force participation rate is especially low in the Middle East and North Africa (36 women per 100 men) and in South Asia (44 women per 100 men). The wage gap between women and men has been decreasing slowly, but in all countries for which data are available women still earn less than men. In industry and services, this wage gap ranges from 53 to 97 percent. Differentials are especially marked in countries that pursue export-oriented industrialization, those that emphasize traditional complementary gender roles, and those where wages are not determined in centralized collective bargaining.

In part, wage differentials are due to occupational segregation (i.e., women tend to be concentrated in low-level and low-paying occupations). But there also are significant differences within occupations. According to an International Labour Organization review of six diverse occupations (accountant, computer programmer, teacher, construction laborer, nurse, and welder), women typically earn 90 percent of what their male coworkers earn for the same job. In maledominated occupations, such as welding, the difference is even greater, with women earning 79 percent of men in industrialized economies and 75 percent in developing economies. Moreover, within occupations there is no overall trend toward a narrowing of the wage gap. Of the six occupations the International Labour Organization studied, the wage gap increased particularly steeply in the male-dominated occupation of welding and in the female-dominated occupation of primary education teachers.

Problems of equal treatment often have become visible in the area of social security. In many countries social security systems were built on the presumption of a male breadwinner, giving women fewer social security benefits or benefits that were derived from the rights of their husbands. Although these practices are being remedied, the larger problem is the concentration of women in less secure jobs in the informal sector, in part-time work, and in home-based work. Much of this work entails self-employment and lacks any kind of social security. Since the 1980s, women's proportion of self-employment has increased more rapidly than men's, so that in 2000, 34 percent of women in nonagricultural employment worldwide were self-employed (as opposed to 27 percent of men).

Informal sector work has little job security and provides few benefits, but it allows women the flexibility to take care of unpaid household and caring work. Women around the world take primary responsibility for such unpaid work. Women's rights to equal treatment thus are impaired because of their segregation into atypical forms of employment that allow them to combine income earning with their disproportionate burden of household and caring work.

right to education

CEDAW guarantees women equal rights with men in regards to education. This includes the same access to education, scholarships, curricula and quality programs, and the elimination of stereotyped gender roles in schooling. Women have made considerable gains in the area of education during the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. In 2001, the ratio of female primary enrollment reached a global average of 94 per 100 boys. At the secondary level, in most countries, as many or more girls as boys are enrolled in school. The largest gaps continue to exist in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

Despite a reduced gender gap in enrollments, there is a large number of girls (and boys) without access to primary education. Of 115 million school-age children worldwide who do not attend school, three-fifths are girls. In addition, in many countries, a large number of children drop out of school, and illiteracy continues to be a problem. Globally, more than half of all illiterates are women. As with school enrollment, the largest gender gaps exist in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Poverty, AIDS, warfare, and a strong preference for sons are the main obstacles to realizing women's rights to education in these regions.

women's rights are human rights

The slogan that "women's rights are human rights" emerged in the context of the UN Human Rights Conference in 1993 and has catapulted issues of violence against women into the international arena, leading to a declaration of the UN General Assembly on the elimination of violence against women. Whereas international human rights law previously had been interpreted to regulate only conduct in the public sphere (e.g., a state's use of torture), the UN inserted the language of rights into the private sphere. This constituted a victory for feminists in their effort to combat widespread practices of violence against women. These have included domestic violence (murder, rape, and battery), gender-based violence by the police and during armed conflict, violence associated with prostitution and trafficking, sexual harassment, limits on reproductive rights (including forced pregnancy, forced abortion, or forced sterilization), and female genital mutilation.

Domestic violence is widespread around the world. Indeed, 23 to 33 percent of women in different contexts indicate that they have experienced physical abuse from a male partner. In the United States, 23 women per week were murdered by an intimate partner in 1999. In Bangladesh, 50 percent of all murders are of husbands killing their wives. Rape similarly terrorizes women all over the world and is severely underreported. It occurs in homes but also in public contexts where men exert power over women, for example, in the workplace or in jails. Highly stigmatized, there is a tendency to blame the victims.

Reproductive rights is an issue of contention in international forums, entangled in the politics of abortion. They are defined in CEDAW as "the same rights to decide freely and responsibly on the number and spacing of children and to have access to the information, education and means to enable them to exercise these rights" (UN Division for the Advancement of Women, 1981, Article 16). Women's ability to decide freely about having children is often constrained because they lack negotiating power in their sexual relationships and because of a lack of reproductive health services.

According to the Safe Motherhood Initiative, about one-third of the 200 million pregnancies each year are unwanted. Yet, more than 350 million couples worldwide do not have access to a full range of contraceptive methods and information. The result is a severe curtailment of women's reproductive rights with often fatal consequences. According to the World Health Organization, there are about 20 million unsafe abortions every year leading to 70,000 maternal deaths. In addition, more than 500,000 women die each year from the effects of pregnancy and childbirth, deaths that could be prevented through adequate maternal health care programs.

Female genital mutilation, or female circumcision, entails the cutting and/or removal of women's genitals to ensure their desirability for marriage. Found in parts of Africa and the Middle East, it violates women's basic human right to bodily integrity. Women who have undergone female genital mutilation face severe health problems and lose the ability to enjoy sex. They face life-long problems with infection, are twice as likely to die during childbirth, and more likely to bear stillborn children. Governments have been reluctant to interfere with the practice and have accused critics of misunderstanding local cultures. However, there is significant mobilization against female genital mutilation on the part of feminists in the countries concerned.

Worldwide, women's movements and their organizations struggle to realize equal rights for women. The UN has become an important ally in this struggle, having made gender equality one of its "Millennium Goals." Although governments and the UN can provide legal frameworks and resources, the realization of women's equal rights will require the continued vigilance of activists committed to women's empowerment, wealth, and well-being.

See also: Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women; Gender Discrimination; Human Rights; Reproductive Rights; Suffrage; United Nations.

bibliography

Cook, Rebecca J., ed. Human Rights of Women: National and International Perspectives. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.

International Labour Organization. Global Employment Trends for Women 2004. Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2004. <http://kilm.ilo.org/GET2004/DOWNLOAD/trendsw.pdf>.

International Planned Parenthood Federation. IPPF Charter Facts on Sexual and Reproductive Rights. London: International Planned Parenthood Federation, 2003. <http://www.ippf.org/charter/PDF/IPPF_Factsheet.pdf>.

Jayawardena, Kumari. Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. London: Zed Books, 1986.

Mayer, Mary K., and Elisabeth Prügl, eds. Gender Politics in Global Governance. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999.

Peters, Julie, and Andrea Wolper, eds. Women's Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives. London: Routledge, 1995.

Pietlä, Hilkka, and Jeanne Vickers. Making Women Matter: The Role of the United Nations. London: Zed Books, 1990.

Seager, Joni. The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World. New York: Penguin Books, 2003.

United Nations Development Programme. Human Development Report. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. <http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2003/>.

United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, 1981. <http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/text/econvention.htm>.

United Nations Women's Fund. Progress of the World's Women: Vol. 2. Gender Equality and the Millennium Development Goals. New York: United Nations Women's Fund, 2002. <http://www.unifem.org/index.php?f_page_pid=10>.

World Health Organization. World Health Day: Safe Motherhood, April 7, 1998. <http://www.who.int/archives/whday/en/pages1998/whd98_10.html>.

Elisabeth Prügl