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The present-day position of women world-wide and in Belarus

Millions of women throughout the world live in conditions of abject deprivation of, and attacks against, their fundamental human rights for no other reason than that they are women.

The Charter of the United Nations was the first international agreement to proclaim gender equality as a fundamental human right. Over the years, the Organization has helped create a historic legacy of internationally agreed strategies, standards, programmes and goals to advance the status of women worldwide. Gender equality is both a goal in itself and a prerequisite for reaching the millennium targets.

Due to the efforts of the UN, other international and human rights organizations some improvements in the status of women have been achieved.

But according to the Equal Opportunities Commission – an independent government-funded body in the UK that works to stamp out discrimination, “women still enjoy only a veneer of equality. We find that while there are many successes to celebrate, there is still a great deal further to go to close the inequality gaps between men and women. The challenges to going forward include overcoming the myth that gender equality is won.”

In the USA, though women today are holding paid jobs of greater diversity than ever before and many more women have entered the new high-technology industries, they continue to be paid less for their labour than men. Even when they do the same kind of work at the same level, they are frequently paid less than men.

Many policymakers now believe that the major problem for working women is not equal pay for equal work or equal access to jobs although both are important but the undervaluation of work traditionally done by women.

Despite the fact that women constitute more than one-third of the world’s labour force, in general they remain concentrated in a limited number of traditional occupations, many of which do not require highly technical qualifications and most of which are low paid. Among Western nations, Sweden has come closest to achieving equality in employment. At the same time, the Swedish government undertook major reforms of textbooks and curricula, parent education, child-care and tax policies, and marriage and divorce laws, all geared to accord women equal opportunities in the labour market while also recognizing their special needs if they are mothers.

Japan, the most industrialized nation in the Far East, generally has retained its traditional attitudes toward working women. For e.g., women are expected to retire when they have children.

Much of Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America remain primarily poor agricultural economies. Most women work in the fields and marketplaces, but their economic contributions are generally unrecognized.

In Africa as a whole, eight women out of ten are illiterate.

Despite the efforts to better the lot of one half of the world’s population, remarkable success stories co-exist with blatant discrimination, huge advances are balanced by humiliating retreats. Elsewhere in the world women have found cultural prejudices as hard to change as political ones. The spread of Islamic fundamentalism has meant the return of the chador and the loss of many hard-won freedoms. Female genital mutilation (FGM) is still practiced in many countries and in South Africa women aren’t covered by labour legislation, maternity benefits or unemployment insurance provisions. Honor killings and dowry deaths still occur not only on the Indian subcontinent, but also in Muslim communities in Western Europe.



According to some researchers the reason for not equality of men and women may lie in a particular representation of a woman in education. Illustrations and texts in spelling, reading, mathematics, science, and social studies in United States primary school textbooks were examined and tend to convince young girls that they should be passive and dependent creatures who need aspire only to lives of service to their future husbands and children, a conference of educators was told here yesterday.

The female stereotype presented to elementary school children was so overwhelming that by the time most girls reached fourth grade they believed they had only four occupations open to them – nurse, secretary, teacher, or mother.

Most stories and illustrations tended to centre on boys rather than girls, and those boys tended to demonstrate qualities of strength, intelligence, love of adventure, independence, and courage. Girls, however, were depicted in passive roles. Usually they were inside a house, and often they were helping with housework or playing with dolls. When boys and girls appeared together in a text the girls were either watching the boys do something or they were helping the boys. Adult men appearing in elementary school texts were depicted in various jobs – astronaut, truck driver, policeman, cowboy, scientist, banker – in addition to the role of father. But the overwhelming picture of women that emerged from the elementary texts was that of mother and housewife. According to the findings the composite housewife or mother was a “limited, colourless, mindless creature... Not only does she wash, cook, clean, nurse, and find mittens: these chores constitute her only happiness”.

Abuses against women are relentless, systematic, and widely tolerated, if not explicitly condoned. Violence and discrimination against women are global social epidemics, notwithstanding the very real progress of the international women’s human rights movement in identifying, raising awareness about, and challenging impunity for women’s human rights violation. The realization of women’s rights is a global struggle based on universal human rights and the rule of law. It requires all people to unite in solidarity to end traditions, practices and laws that harm women.

 


Date: 2015-12-17; view: 1176


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