|Dr. Urvashi Sahni
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
International Women’s Day, March 8th, is here again, and it is time to take stock of women’s lives in the world today. Great progress has been made in education and for women more broadly. Still, so much work remains to ensure that women are empowered, educated, safe, healthy and free to be fully participating members of equal societies. In India, the recent groundswell of support for women and girls speaks to the potential to overturn harmful gender norms. We need approaches, such as self-organizing and campaigning for women’s rights, gender-sensitive education, and including men in the fight for equality, that go beyond business as usual. At the global level, it is critical that the next set of development goals hold actors to better account for progress for women and girls.
In many countries, the situation for women is improving at the highest levels of leadership and among the poor, even if slowly. There are now 17 female heads of state around the world—almost twice as many as in 1990. According to UNESCO’s Global Monitoring Report, the number of countries where girls face severe gender disparity – defined as having less than nine girls in primary school for every ten boys – has dropped from 33 countries in 1999 to 17 in 2010. Gender parity at the secondary level has improved and, when girls make it to the secondary level in most countries, their retention and progression is the same or better than boys. More women are receiving antenatal care and skilled assistance during delivery—one of the most critical times in the prevention of maternal mortality.
While the international community welcomes and celebrates the gains for women and girls, much more needs to be done to ensure women and girl’s equality, and to meet the goals set out by the first set of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Women are still largely unsafe, unwanted and unequal in the developing world. There are 4 million missing women and girls each year in developing countries. They are killed in the womb, soon after birth or during their child-bearing years. Most countries will miss the Education For All goal of a 50 percent improvement in adult literacy—a challenge that disproportionately affects women, who make up about two-thirds of the 775 million adults who cannot read. In addition to addressing lagging progress in female mortality reduction and access to education and economic opportunity, the World Development Report 2012 calls for renewed efforts to increase women’s voice and agency in the home and society, and to limit the reproduction of gender inequality across generations. Gender-based violence also continues to plague women around the world. According to CARE’s Women and Empowerment report, at least one in three females has been physically or sexually abused, often repeatedly and by a relative or acquaintance. Violence rivals cancer as a cause of morbidity and mortality for women of child-bearing age.
In India, the case for renewed commitment to women and girls is clear. The government has made significant efforts to improve conditions for women and girls, including creating a large-scale girls’ education program that provides schools and support for girls in rural areas and has already helped to narrow the gender gap. Still, much remains to be done by the government and all other stakeholders. The child mortality rate in India is the highest in the world and some estimate that in India 1 million girls are killed in the womb each year, and. In terms of education, gender overlaps with other causes of marginalization, including poverty, location (rural vs. urban) and social factors, such caste and tribe to worsen access and outcomes. For instance, according to the World Inequality Database on Education, in 2005, 31 percent of women age 17-22 years had less than four years of school, compared to 16 percent of men. Among the poor in the poorer regions of India, the numbers were as high as 91 percent of women compared to 55 percent of men.
Of all the challenges that women and girls face, to