Gender Equality

In Haiti, a 12-year-old girl and her 10-year-old sister spend their days toiling in the fields with their mother. The tropical sun is hot, and the work is always hard and tiring. Both girls would rather be in school like their brothers but their father has told them that girls don’t need an education.

In China, a passerby spots a small, ragged bundle by the side of a country road. The bundle is crying. The passerby picks up the bundle and unwraps it. It is a newborn baby girl. The passerby isn’t surprised by his discovery. In his country, girl babies are often abandoned by their parents because of a culturally based preference for boy babies.

Although they live on opposite sides of the world and their life circumstances are different, the young Haitian girls and the Chinese baby share the same problem. They are victims of gender-based discrimination.

What is gender-based discrimination?

Gender-based discrimination means that girls and women do not have the same opportunities as boys and men for education, meaningful careers, political influence, and economic advancement. Also, when women and men perform the same tasks for pay, women are often paid less and receive fewer benefits from their work than men. Even in industrialized and developed countries like Canada, women earn an average of 77 percent of what men earn. In developing countries, this drops to 73 percent.

The late Charlotte Whitton, first woman mayor of Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, perhaps put it best when she said: “Whatever women do they must do it twice as well as men to be thought half as good….”

Where does it happen?

Gender-based discrimination happens everywhere, even in countries like Canada that have legislation opposing it or which support international agreements in favour of gender equality.Most of the world community supports in principle several agreements that guarantee gender equality:

• the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted on December 10, 1948, states that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…”?
• the 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights focused on gender inequality and stated clearly that women’s rights are human rights, and
• the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, adopted in 1979, defines discrimination against women and sets up an agenda for action to end such discrimination

There are probably as many individual reasons for gender-based discrimination as there are individuals who practise it. The root causes can be traced to culture, which is the quality in every society that shapes the way ‘things are done’ and the understanding of why this should be so. Expectations about attributes and behaviours appropriate to women and men and about the relations between women and men—in other words, gender—are shaped by culture.

In most societies there are clear patterns of “women's work” and “men's work”, both in the household and in the wider community, and cultural explanations of why this should be so. The patterns and the explanations differ among societies and change over time.

While gender relations may vary from society to society, the general pattern is that women have less personal autonomy, fewer resources at their disposal, and limited influence over the decision-making processes that shape their societies and their own lives.

In practice, gender equality simply means that both men and women can exercise their rights and realize their full human potential, regardless of their gender.

Why oppose gender discrimination?

Women have a huge influence on the well-being of their families and societies. When a country educates its girls as well as its boys, economic productivity rises, maternal and infant mortality rates fall, fertility rates decline, and the health and educational prospects of the next generation are improved. Refusing or failing to educate females perpetuates the cycle of poverty, a fact recognized in the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals, a set of targets for improvements in all areas of human development by 2015 that will bring the world closer to the vision of a better life.Gender equality is among the Millennium Development Goals because all the other goals—achieving universal primary education, eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, improving maternal health, reducing child mortality, combating HIV/AIDS and other diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability, and developing a global partnership for development—depend on it.

A few facts to ponder

Consider the following:

• More than 80 percent of the world’s 35 million refugees are women and children;
• More than 110 million of the world’s children, two-thirds of them girls, are not in school;
• At least one in every three women is a survivor of some form of gender-based violence, frequently inflicted by a family member;
• Women represent, on average, less than 10 percent of the seats in national parliaments; and
• In sub-Saharan Africa, 58 percent of persons infected with HIV/AIDS are women.