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'When you grow up, you can be whatever you want
to be.' Little girls in developed countries hear
this all the time from their mothers and
teachers and from the characters in Dora the
Explorer. Almost everywhere they go, girls are
encouraged to believe that they can be just as
smart, strong, and successful as boys. Even the
pictures of courageous women on magazine covers
give out the message that even if you're a girl,
everything is still possible. But for little
girls in many developing countries, the message
is just the opposite. From the first day they
are born, they are constantly reminded of the
things that are not appropriate and things that
are not possible to achieve since they are born
as girls. While women in the United States and
Europe often measure sex discrimination by how
much they are paid and their positions in
boardrooms, women in Third World countries
gauge
discrimination by mortality rates and poverty
levels.
For countries from as far as South America to
South Asia, women are likely to experience a
lifetime of discrimination with little or no
hope of help. As children, they are fed less,
denied education and refused hospitalisation. As
teenagers, many are forced into marriage,
sometimes bought and sold into prostitution and
slave labour. As wives and mothers, they are
treated little better than farm animals and
baby-making machines. Should
they outlive
their husbands, they are frequently not allowed
to inherit wealth, and are often pushed out of
their homes and forced to live as beggars on the
streets.
In many South Asian countries, arranged
marriages are the norm and it can sometimes be
the beginning of the most humiliating passage a
woman has to go through. Two types are common:
bride wealth, in which the bride's family
essentially gives her to the highest bidder, and
dowry, in which the bride's family pays
extremely high amounts to the husband's family.
In some African countries, owning a house by
a woman is totally against the law. In Pakistan,
a daughter is legally entitled to half the
inheritance that a son gets when their parents
die. In some criminal cases, testimony by women
is legally given half the weight of a man's
testimony, and compensation for the wrongful
death of a woman is half that of the wrongful
death of a man.
Across the developing world, girls are forced
to leave school years before boys so that they
can be at home and and help with domestic chores
such as lugging water, working the fields and
raising younger siblings. Statistics from
Pakistan demonstrate the low priority given to
female education: only one-third of the
country's schools - which are sexually
segregated-are for women, and one-third of those
have no building. Almost 90 percent of the women
over age 25 are illiterate. In the predominantly
rural state of Baluchistan, less than 2 percent
of women can read and write.
Discrimination against girls and women in
many developing countries is a devastating
reality. It results in millions of individual
tragedies, which at the end of the day leads to
lost potential for entire countries. Studies
show that there is a direct link between a
country's attitude towards women and its
progress socially and economically. The status
of women is central to the health of a society.
If one part suffers, so does the whole
country. |
