One way to make the world a considerably better place would be to get really serious at last about the place of women in almost all societies. A quarter of a century ago the United Nations calculated that women do nearly 70 per cent of the world’s work in exchange for 10 per cent of its income. Has anything changed? In 1999 UN figures showed that 70 per cent of the world’s women live in ‘abject poverty’; its 2002 figures show that only 1 per cent of all land is owned by women; its 2001 figures show that in Africa women produce 80 per cent of foodstuffs, and in Asia contribute up to 90 per cent of the labour for rice production (figures from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation). The UN’s ‘Women’s World’ survey of 1995 showed that on average world-wide, women work two hours longer every day than men. (That looks like a considerable underestimate; it was a commonplace of my childhood in Africa to see women hoeing in the maize fields, babies tied to their backs, while the men fanned themselves lazily in the shade, discoursing of this and that – most of the day, most days.)
The cumulative picture of profound injustice that these raw data give is exacerbated by the associated conditions in which women’s lack of education and exclusion from decision-making processes in economic and political respects is endemic in the great majority of societies. In today’s Middle East a shocking 53 per cent of women are illiterate and almost all of them are wholly excluded from the public sphere. In Africa it has been found that just two years of elementary education for girls, giving them basic literacy and numeracy, reduces birth-rates and improves child mortality, and enables women to get access to medical care, contraception and other benefits. In South Asia micro-loan schemes for women have dramatically improved the conditions of life for women and their children in areas where they are available, as shown by the success of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.
The twin keys are education and participation in the public sphere made possible by fully applied sex equality laws. There is hardly anywhere in the world, including the US and Europe, where there is genuine equality between men and women, yet it is obvious that the most developed countries have the highest female participation in public and economic life. Historically this has been a result of development rather than its cause, but arguably such development would not have been sustainable without it, because having the skill potential of one half of the population unavailable would eventually have constituted a brake – despite in the earlier phases having been part of the slave or virtual-slave labour on which all major economies have depended at their outset (and today’s China, in violation of human rights, still does).
I write of developed countries as having ‘the highest participation in public and economic life’ by women, and yet despite the fact that in the US more women gain university degrees than men (57 per cent), they are still in a minority in the higher reaches of science, education and public life, have a tougher time getting there, and earn less when they arrive: this is a familiar picture, and all the less acceptable for being so.
There are many reasons for all this, most of them by now well known: in advanced economies the refusal of organisations to restructure working patterns and hours to accommodate family life, in backward countries the repressive presence of religion, in all dispensations the persistence of attitudes and practices that structurally weigh against women, making it very difficult for them to combine domestic commitments and access to what a male-orientated world regards as economically rewardable while at the same time grossly undervaluing women’s vital contributions in child-bearing, home-making, and work as educators and carers.
Ours is a fabulously unjust world – to the criminally unfair position of women we could add labour exploitation of most of the world’s male workers too, and exploitation of children; massive disproportions in wealth and power between countries; and inequalities of opportunity and access to the goods of the human condition (e.g. education, medical provision, books, information, jobs) in almost every sphere both within and between societies. And again this leaves aside the fact that women are subjects of abuse, violence and exploitation, much of it sexual, and too often without redress or the hope of protection, which deepens their disenfranchisement. But the injustice suffered by the world’s women in particular in economic and political respects creates and perpetuates a myriad problems entailed by the skewing of public interests in the direction of such less desirable male propensities as aggression and war. It takes quite a propaganda success to convince women that they bear and raise children so that those children can end as battlefield corpses; left to decide for themselves on such issues, women would very probably see to it that there were far fewer such corpses lying around.
There is no ground for deriving a great part of the explanation for the difference in the experience of men and women from reproductive biology alone. The difference is a datum, sure enough, but a just and considerate society would value the difference properly, and accommodate itself to its exigencies. We have equality laws in more advanced countries, but we do not yet have equality; in less developed countries the situation of women screams out for attention, yet it occupies far too little of our thoughts. For the future’s sake this absolutely and imperatively has to change.