Access To Education

'Women hold up half the sky,' said Mao Tse-tung. Women should not be seen as the property of men, to be exploited, demeaned and degraded, but spin the globe. In China, baby boys are greeted by celebrations of joy, while baby girls elicit condolences. In El Salvador, women are arrested out of hospital emergency rooms if they are suspected of having had an abortion. In Moldova and elsewhere, thousands of young women are either kidnapped or sold by their starving families or lured with promises of employment and then sold across borders into a sex-slave trade. In the Congo, as in Bosnia before it, the rape of women has been a systematic part of a civil war. In the sweatshops of China and Honduras, women toil in sweatshops where working conditions are harsh and unsafe. In India, hundreds of wives are set on fire and murdered each year by husbands or in-laws once the dowry has been paid. In some countries in Africa, tradition dictates that families mutilate their own female children in order to blunt sexual sensation and 'prepare' the girls to be 'proper' and loyal wives. In the Middle East and South Asia, women are ostracized, even killed by brothers and fathers if they 'bring shame' on the family. Here are two stories from Amnesty International: When Rhaya in Sumatra was raped by her sister's husband and became pregnant from the attack, she was forced out of her home because staying would bring 'shame' to her village. When a young woman known as 'the girl from Al-Qatif ' was gang-raped by seven men in Saudi Arabia, she was sentenced to six months' imprisonment and 200 lashes for being alone in private with a member of the opposite sex who was not an immediate family member. In the United States, a woman is beaten by her partner every 15 seconds. In the U.S. and Europe, pre-teen girls are taught to dress and move like sex objects before they understand what sex even is. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the lifetime risk of dying during pregnancy is one in 16. On the planet, one woman dies every minute from preventable, pregnancy-related conditions. The Millennium Development Goals Report 2007, by the United Nations, estimates that, 'preventing unplanned pregnancies alone could avert around one quarter of maternal deaths.'

Women produce half of the world's food and contribute two thirds of the world's working hours, but women earn only 10 percent of the world's income and own one percent of the world's property. Since women and girls often cook, clean, farm and provide health care and hygiene for their households, the quality and accessibility of water is especially important for them. Not the (Gender) Role She was BORN to Play : Traditional Perceptions & Expectations of Women Impede Gender Equality in the U.S. & Abroad Overconsumption, rapid population growth, privatization and climate change all put an added strain on already limited freshwater systems. For many girls who must walk miles to get clean water, attending school is not an option. Without a basic education, many women become locked into a vicious cycle of poverty.

There are few ways out of this poverty when the World Bank and other international financial institutions (IFIs) continue to finance dirty energy and extractive industries, and to use an instrumentalist approach to gender equality that marginalizes women's rights and overlooks the crippling effects of policy-based loan conditions on women in developing countries. A pamphlet by Gender Action explains that IFIs continue to impose strict economic conditions on debtor countries through policy-based lending. These conditions are not gender neutral. Poor women become the shock absorbers for neoliberal economic reforms imposed by IFIs. For example, privatization of essential services forces girls out of school and women out of work to fill healthcare and childcare needs within families. Public sector downsizing means women, whose income is often considered secondary, are the first fired and last hired during government retrenchment. 'Trade and capital account liberalization lead to increasingly flexible labor standards for female employees who predominate in export sectors and processing zones; those women who provide cheap labor at the bottom of global supply chains often face short-term contracts, dangerous working conditions, erratic hours, no benefits, intimidation and sexual exploitation.'

In World Bank-managed reconstruction projects in post-tsunami Indonesia, Gender Action found that most projects entirely failed to address gender concerns in project components, community participation measures, social context analyses and monitoring and evaluation processes, despite firm gender policy commitments to do so. Climate change unequally impacts poor women. They are the resource managers and the farmers. Thus, they are more at risk of losing their livelihood when weather patterns shift. It is women who care for sick family members who drink contaminated water. It is women who face heightened domestic violence and sexual exploitation when droughts, floods and soil erosion increase conflict over natural resources.

'There will be no climate justice without gender justice,' contends Gender Action. A success story from Senegal shows how the two intertwine. In the rural community of Keur Moussa, where erosion and land degradation led to insufficient agricultural yields, three villages were chosen to participate in erosion control projects. Women in these villages took active leadership in the projects by building stone barriers and doing reforestation to increase crop productivity. Vegetation in the area began to regenerate and diverse herbs began to grow. In working to stabilize soils and retard erosion, the women also recharged groundwater and created water bodies. The time women spend collecting water has decreased from two or three hours to about one hour a day.

The web stretches from Senegal to Egypt to the USA. Its well-being begins with the empowerment of women. When women have access to family planning services, they tend to have smaller, bettereducated, healthier families and are better able to participate in sustainable resource management within communities. The United Nations Fund for Population Activities figures that there are 215 million women in the world who would like to have access to contraception but who cannot get it. In this country, as elsewhere, people in authority, mostly men, continue to play politics with women's reproductive rights. (What better way to subjugate women?) Imagine, though, how the other strands in the web would be affected if contraception were readily available to anyone who wanted it?

There are also opportunities to strengthen the gender justice strand. Congress can pass the International Violence Against Women Act. Moreover, the U.S. government can ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. The U.S., by the way, is the only country in the Western Hemisphere and one of only seven countries worldwide that have not ratified this treaty.

We must not accept violence against women as merely a regrettable reality. We must not deny access to family planning information and contraception to those who want it. We must not let the three drivers of environmental impact-population, consumption and technology-to continue full speed ahead. Catholic priest and ecological philosopher Thomas Berry observed that, in the 20th century, the glory of the human became the desolation of the Earth. In the 21st century, the desolation of the Earth is becoming the destiny of the human.