That Development Lady

President Clinton opened the second day of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting by reciting damning statistics about women’s economic marginalization, including that only 30% of the world’s workforce is made up of women. Women do 66% of world’s work, make only 10% of world’s income, and own only 1% world’s property. He said investing in women “can unleash an estimated $15 billion in annual productivity.”

Investing in Girls and Women was hosted by Diane Sawyer. The panelists were: Edna Adan, Director and Founder, Edna Adan Maternity and Teaching Hospital; Lloyd Blankfein, Chairman and CEO, The Goldman Sachs Group; Zainab Salbi, Founder and CEO, Women for Women International; Rex W. Tillerson, Chief Executive Officer, ExxonMobil Corporation; Melanne Verveer, Ambassador-at-Large for Women’s Issues, U.S. State Department; and Robert Zoellick, President, The World Bank Group.

For the businessmen on the panel “empowering” women seemed to be more about using them as the person that funds go through. Blankfein said investing in women has the highest leverage because they support their families. The point was reiterated a number of times by a number of speakers that funds are best used when they go to women.

While the businessmen seemed to lack much of a focus on anything but investing in women to benefit their own bottom line, the women on the panel who are actually engaged in this work brought excellent incite.

Salbi was amazing. She said women are dying, being displaced and raped at alarming rates during warfare. “But they have no choice but to stand up on their feet because they have children.” Women are the ones who maintain culture. They’re the only ones not raping, pillaging, murdering, but they are not included at the table to discuss solutions.

Salbi said in southern Sudan 9 year old girls are being exchanged for cows in marriage agreements. She said we can criticize these cows or we can invest in women’s education and show the economic benefit of empowering women as an alternative source of income for parents.

Tillerson made a number of remarks that were either incomprehensible or deeply problematic (or both). In response to Tillerson saying that funding is not the issue, Salbi emphatically pointed out that 1 cent of every funding dollar goes to women. There is a need for both education and resources so women can renegotiate the decision making process in households and countries.

Sawyer asked Tillerson: given the extreme poverty of women in Detroit, how do you decide to invest here or overseas? Once again Salbi jumped in with an important point: women’s issues and girls issues are not just a third world issue. it’s a global issue.

Salbi emphasized three needs: political will and the will of leadership; women organizing, which is happening globally; and societal acknowledgement of women’s role.

Edna Adan, Director and Founder, Edna Adan Maternity and Teaching Hospital, was also an amazing speaker. She focused on the importance of skilled birth attendants in Somalia. “Reproductive health is affected by nutrition, is affected by age at which she is married, so many other factors.” She said women are dying in childbirth, “because nobody cares… [People think] she’s dying because she was meant to die. She was not meant to die. She could be safe.” “The decision of whether she has treatment must be left to the woman. often its a husband or a brother or a father who decides whether she will be taken to the hospital or not.” There is a view that the husband owns the unborn child and therefore the decision is his, which must be countered through education.

Adan said these issues are not just women’s issues and that we need to engage men: “It is demanding men stand up and recognize women belong on this earth.”

the-activista:

usydwomenscollective: little-mumbles:

“Woman, if you look for her, has a strong chance of always being found in one position: in bed. In bed and asleep - “laid (out).” She is always to be found on or in a bed: Sleeping Beauty is lifted from her bed by a man because, as we all know, women don’t wake up by themselves: man has to intervene, you understand. She is lifted up by the man who will lay her in her next bed so that she may be confined to bed ever after, just as the fairytales say.”

Cixous, Helene (1981) “Castration or Decapitation”, Annette Kuhn (trans.), Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 7 (1), p. 43

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This brings me back to the analysis class I took on women in politics as pertaining to television and film media. Ironically enough, Disney’s Princesses are the first images of women with power that young girls will consume- they are aristocrats who hold in their very being the ability to determine a kingdom’s future. The downside seems to be, though, that they are less empowered by that than disempowered by the soul mate ideal; they are less worried about qualifications and more about male validation when deciding whom to choose as theirs and, therefore, their kingdom’s.

(Disney is the best for feminist query.)

usydwomenscollective:

abbyjean:

Ever since the abuse occurred, the media has been fixating on Brown and Rihanna, intent on interpreting each and every one of their actions in light of what they say about Brown’s abuse of Rihanna, or about Rihanna’s recovery from said abuse, or about domestic abuse in general. Nowadays, they’re less important to us as pop stars than as the means by which we have a national conversation about abuse. And that conversation is important. But centering it all on one famous couple distorts the truth, and may prevent people from understanding some key things about abusive relationships.

For starters: Chris Brown is not the only abuser in the world. He’s just one of the most immediately recognizable. Too many people treat Chris Brown as if he is some uniquely monstrous villain; instead of recognizing that abuse is often rooted just as much in cultural norms as in individual psychology (specifically, those cultural norms that say men should be dominant, and respond to perceived threats to their dominance with aggression, and that women’s bodies and lives should be subject to outside control) they make it a conversation about whether he is a bad person. He just might be! But, to minimize or eliminate abuse, we can’t focus on saving each and every individual soul. We have to focus on changing the culture.

Then, there’s the Rihanna coverage. It’s rare to see her name without a mention of the abuse close by. And far too many people feel the need to weight in on whether her actions are “healthy” or “appropriate” or “right” for someone who has been abused – that is to say, whether she’s a good abuse survivor or a bad one.

In conversations about abuse, personal virtue – heck, personality in general – is beside the point. But it keeps getting introduced, and undermining the points at hand. The fact is that abuse is abuse is abuse: even if you are the least likable person in the entire world, it is still wrong for your partner to beat you up. Even if you spend your weekends giving away free puppies and hugs to sad orphans, beating your partner up is still wrong. So, here’s my suggestion: why don’t we stop talking about whether Chris Brown is good or bad, stop talking about whether Rihanna is good or bad, and start talking about abuse itself? Because that’s really bad. And its badness is not mitigated in any way by who does it to whom. (the infinitely wise sady at bitch)

All of these stats are taken from the New York Times Special Issue on Saving the World’s Women, unless otherwise noted

1-Women own 1% of the world’s land.

2-The poorest families in the world spend approximately 10 times as much (20 percent of their incomes on average) on a combination of alcohol, prostitution, candy, sugary drinks and lavish feasts as they do on educating their children (2 percent).

3-The delivery of vaccinations and other kinds of health care has reduced the number of children who die every year before they reach the age of 5 to less than 10 million today from 20 million in 1960.

4-In India, a “bride burning” takes place approximately once every two hours, to punish a woman for an inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry

5-About 107 million females are missing from the globe today

6-At any one time there are 12.3 million people engaged in forced labor of all kinds, including sexual servitude

7-In Niger, a woman has a 1 in 7 chance of dying from childbirth. In India, she has a a 1 in 70 chance. In the US, that chance is reduced to 1 in 4 800.

8-85% of the people who die in natural disasters are women (Oxfam Canada).