Tag Archives: women

Happy International Women’s Day!

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One of the best ways to celebrate International Women’s Day is to say Thank You to the truly awe inspiring women in your life. From gratitude springs humility and empathy. With these we can grow a more bountiful world for everyone.

In that vein, and to celebrate the diverse awesomeness of Women, The Coloured Collective would like to thank all of you lovely readers for following us. We have met so many brilliant women through this blog.

Also, a few of our contributors here at Coloured Collective would like to take this chance to send out a few shout outs of gratitude.

From Christen James

I was trying to be less cliche than going with my mother, but there is no one else on this planet that I could spend the rest of my life saying “thank you” to. Thank you, mammy, for the very early lesson on being independent. This truly has shaped me into the woman I am today and strive to be. Thank you for your quiet reassurance yet always having the right thing to say, but most of all for telling me that you’re proud of me. I not only aim to be everything that you wanted me to be but also all that you wanted for yourself. I am living my dream by living yours.

From Ramona Wright @mswrightsays www.mswrightsays.com

To Adelaide Smith, thanks for being the woman who made me into the woman I am today.  You raised me with faith and unconditional love.  I love you and miss you everyday Mom (RIP)!

From Lisa Rajkumar-Maharaj

Corinne Hebden, thank you for being an amazing Midwife. You brought my baby into this world and shepherded me safely through the process. Your wisdom, heart and professionalism made an indelible mark on my life. 

If there’s someone you want to give a shout out of gratitude to, feel free to do so in the comment section. We’d love to hear more stories of amazing women.

 

Big in Japan? Not if you’re a Woman

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Courtesy: Businessweek

While women around the world are governing countries, leading central banks, running companies and coaching tennis stars, in Japan they’re being subject to sexist taunts from the Dark Ages.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has pledged to increase access to the country’s notoriously inadequate daycare facilities, extend maternity leave and encourage companies to name female board members in a highly publicised campaign against gender inequality. But these remain well-intentioned proposals at best, undermined by a deep-rooted patriarchy and a widely held notion that a woman’s place is at home, raising kids in her geta sandals.

Last week, these traits were on display for all to see, as Ayaka Shiomura, a Tokyo assemblywoman, was reduced to tears by the jeering of her male colleagues when she called on the local government to assist women with child rearing and to fund infertility treatments. Her crime? Being single and childless.

Japan’s male leaders have a long history of sexism, calling women baby-making machines and labeling career women selfish for delaying childbirth and undeserving of pensions. Even in companies, women are expected to serve the tea at meetings, no matter their position.

Japanese men are clearly oblivious to just how badly they need women to take on more jobs and be more involved in governing. Japan ranks behind Saudi Arabia in the proportion of women in parliament, according to a gender-gap report by the World Economic Forum. Its working-age population is set to shrink by almost half by 2060. Japan’s GDP could rise by as much as 13 percent by closing the gender employment gap, according to a Goldman Sachs report.

Criticising an assemblywoman in a public meeting for her choices is hardly assuring. Japanese men may try leaning in a bit. 

Forget the Nukes, We Need to Talk About Our Women

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Courtesy: ctvnews

There was much excitement this week on South Asia as the newly-crowned Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Modi, who won the election with the largest mandate in 30 years, took the unprecedented step of inviting Sharif to his inauguration, and much to everyone’s surprise, Sharif accepted the invitation.

That India and Pakistan are unfriendly neighbours, everyone knows. They’ve sparred over everything from cricket to their nuclear arms and even their mangoes. While improved ties between the two countries, which have been to war thrice since 1947, is undoubtedly desirable and crucial to peace in the region, what’s missing on any checklist is steps to improve the status of women in both countries.

In the same week that the two leaders held their ground-breaking meeting, a pregnant woman was stoned to death outside a court in Lahore for marrying a man of her choice, while in India, two teen-aged girls were gang-raped and hanged from a tree in a village in Uttar Pradesh state. Sharif has condemned the incident in Pakistan; there is no official response yet from Modi.

The two countries have a combined population of 1.4 billion. They have similar languages and cuisines, share customs and traditions, and a love for music, movies and cricket. They are also alike in treating their womenfolk badly. While the two countries have had a woman prime minister each and women in senior government positions, both rank low on the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Report: India at 101 and Pakistan at 135, one notch above the bottom and lower than their other neighbours. While Pakistan fares poorly on all four metrics, both countries do particularly badly on Economic Opportunity and Opportunity and Health and Survival.

So while it is indeed important that the two prime ministers talk about terrorism, it is also equally important that they talk about the status of women in their countries, and what they can do to improve their lot. That would be truly ground-breaking.

When Daughters Don’t Return Home From School

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Courtesy: batangablog

The South Korean ferry tragedy is not the only bit of sad news about school children this month; days before, gunmen had stormed a girls’ school in Chibok in Nigeria’s north-eastern state of Borno, and abducted more than 200 students. Dozens managed to escape, with no trace of the remainder. The police called off the search this week, leaving frantic parents to search the forest themselves.

The mass kidnap was allegedly by Islamist group Boko Haram, which is linked to the al-Qaeda. Boko Haram means “western education is a sin”, and the group has been waging a violent campaign to impose shariah law, which appears to be particularly opposed to girls’ formal education. Earlier this year, it killed more than 50 students elsewhere in the country. 

More people are obviously familiar with the story of Malala Yousufzai, the Pakistani teenager shot in the head by the Taliban in Swat Valley as she returned from school, for refusing to back down on her activism for education for girls. The U.N. has declared July 12 Malala Day.

There is very little media coverage, let alone accolades for the millions of marginalised children who are denied an education because of discrimination. A Human Rights Watch report this week highlights the widespread discrimination against Indian school children belonging to tribal groups, so-called lower castes and minority communities. It cites Unicef’s estimate that 80 million Indian children will drop out before completing elementary school and lays some of the blame on discrimination and intimidation. This, despite the passage of the Right to Education Act in 2010, which mandates free and compulsory education for all children aged 6 to 14 years. Most examples in the HRW report are of boys, because girl children are often not allowed to go to school at all.

What is a harder problem to have: fearing discrimination against your child in school or fearing your child’s safe return from school?

The Big, Fat, Gender-Biased Indian Election

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Via: WSJ

You may have heard the numbers: 815 million voters; 543 lawmakers; 9 rounds of voting in the world’s largest democracy. You also know who’s projected to win: the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party led by divisive leader Narendra Modi, with the ruling Congress party set for its worst performance ever.

What you probably haven’t heard is how skewed India’s voter gender ratio is: 883 women voters per 1,000 male voters. Give or take. That’s an improvement from 715 per 1,000 male voters in the 1960s, according to data compiled by Shamika Ravi and Mudit Kapoor, professors at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. But it is lower even than the national gender ratio, embarrassing as it is, of 940 women per 1,000 men.

How has this come about? Not for want of legislation. Indian women were granted the right to vote and run in elections three years after India’s independence in 1947, the same year as men. Women have played a significant role in Indian politics down: from Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to present-day chief ministers Mamata Banerjee and Jayalalithaa Jayaram.

Still, India’s largely patriarchal tradition and cultural mores that require women to acquiesce to the opinion of men has meant that women have often not been a part of the political conversation, or showed up to vote on election day. That has also resulted in very few women lawmakers: of nearly 5,000 lawmakers across the country, less than 10 percent are women.

While the Indian government did implement a law in 2009 that mandated the reservation of at least half the seats at panchayati raj or local government institutions in villages and districts for women, it has dragged its feet on the Women’s Reservation Bill. The bill proposes to amend the Indian Constitution to reserve a third of all seats in the lower house and all state legislative assemblies for women, and has not been passed by the lower house after the upper house passed it in 2010.

India ranks 101 out of 136 countries on the World Economic Forum’s 2013 global gender-gap index that examines economic participation, education, health and political empowerment. That is the lowest ranking among the BRIC economies, and is lower than Botswana and Bangladesh.

In this election, the year-old Aam Admi Party has the highest percentage of women candidates, about 15 percent, while the Congress has 12 percent and the BJP has 9 percent. That doesn’t bode well for the future of women’s representation in India.

A Bank of Women, by Women, for Women

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Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last week opened the first branch of the Bharatiya Mahila Bank (Indian Women’s Bank) in Mumbai, which will employ only women, and accept deposits from and lend mostly to women.

Importantly, this bank will have branches in smaller towns and villages where its services are most required. And while men may also operate accounts here, the focus will be on women, and making educating women financially-aware.

Why a bank – primarily – for women? Only 26 percent of women in India have an account in a financial institution – be it a bank, a credit union, a post office or a microfinance institution – compared with 46 percent of men, according to a study by the World Bank. 

Financial inclusion is a big challenge in many developing countries where barriers to opening a bank account or taking a loan include physical distance, lack of documentation and high costs; only 35 percent of Indians have access to banking services compared to a global average of 50 percent, and a developing-nation average of 41 percent, according to World Bank data.

In India, even as more women are getting an education and jobs, millions still have no access to basic financial services and are reduced to being dependent on their fathers or their husbands to manage their money. At the same time, some of the top private banks, from ICICI Bank to HSBC Plc and JP Morgan in India have women CEOs. 

Microfinance institutions and self-help groups have done much to improve access to financial services for women, as have the advent of mobile phones and the rollout of India’s unique identification system. Simply setting up a bank of women will not solve entrenched social issues and traditions which continue to favor men. But it is a start, and much like India’s popular ladies’-special-trains, the bank may lower the barriers for women in a deeply patriarchal society.

Fading Opportunities for Women in the Land of the Rising Sun

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I am just back from a vacation in Japan (highly recommend it), where I was as struck by the cutting-edge technology in everything from toilets to trains and the wondrous aesthetic sense of shop assistants and chefs alike, as I was by the appalling gender gap.

Japan, the world’s third-biggest economy (overtaken by China in 2010, in case you missed it), is the world’s most rapidly aging advanced country, with also the widest gender gap among developed countries. This is not something to be proud of; yet, one leader after another, one CEO after another, has failed to address the issue, to Japan’s great detriment. 

Global female labor-force participation has stalled at about 50 percent for two decades, according to a report in September from the International Monetary Fund.  More than half the nations in East Asia and the Pacific have restrictions on the types of jobs women can do, according to the World Bank. Failure to integrate women fully into the workforce is costing the Asia-Pacific region about $89 billion a year in unrealized output, according to the United Nations. 

Japan’s 63 percent of women in the workforce is comparable more to developing countries, and most women are confined to lower-paying and lower-rung jobs. Even in fancy offices, women until very recently were required to serve tea to their male colleagues and  having a baby is a sure route to career-wilderness, as there is little by way of public daycare, and hiring a nanny is an expensive process.

Christine Lagarde, among the most high-profile women in the world as managing director of the IMF, has made it something of a personal crusade to call out countries on their female participation, and in asking them to report on gender issues. In a paper last year called ‘Can Women Save Japan’, the IMF highlighted the many hurdles to working women in Japan, and suggested ways to remove them – primarily, with policies to reduce the gender gap in work and better support for working mothers. The economic outlook for Japan would be much brighter if more women joined the labour force, it said.

In April, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced measures to elevate the role of women, calling for women to fill 30 percent of senior positions across different parts of the society by 2020 and vowing to eliminate waiting lists for childcare and provide training for mothers returning to work. While Sony, Hitachi, Toshiba and Daiwa have all recently pledged to increase the number of female managers significantly in the coming years, Japan resolutely refuses to mandate quotas for women in the government or in company boards. The sun may well be setting, and quickly.  

Women Are Less Equal in Natural Disasters

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Pic: CNN/Getty Images

The Philippines is still assessing the destruction wreaked by Typhoon Haiyan, which is estimated to have killed at least 10,000 people and caused damage costing billions of dollars. The super typhoon may have a greater economic impact on the country than Hurricane Sandy did in the U.S., according to estimates from disaster modelling by Kinetic Analysis Corp.

What’s definitely clear though, is that the country’s women will be hit harder than the men. This is true not just in the Philippines, but pretty much in any disaster area, particularly in a developing nation.

“There is a pattern of gender differentiation at all levels of the disaster process: exposure to risk, risk perception, preparedness, response, physical impact, psychological impact, recovery and reconstruction,” the World Health Organization notes. “Due to social norms and their interaction with biological factors, women and girls may face increased risk to adverse health effects and violence. They may be unable to access assistance safely and/or to make their needs known. Additionally, women are insufficiently included in community consultation and decision-making processes, resulting in their needs not being met.”

Fortunately, the Philippines has the smallest gender gap among developing nations and its women are a feisty, resilient lot. Even so, the government, aid agencies and donors would be well-advised to keep women front and center as the country recovers from the tragedy.

When Saudi Women Went For a Drive

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A bunch of Saudi Arabian women went for a drive on Saturday. There’s no punchline to that, because there’s nothing funny in the fact that these women risked imprisonment – or worse – in defying a ban on driving in the kingdom.

This was the third such protest staged by Saudi Arabian women against a de facto ban that has led to women being arrested, sentenced to flogged and losing their jobs for defying orders. There have been calls from various quarters to lift this ban – which really has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with exercising control over women. Saudi women also need a man’s permission to get a job or travel abroad.

But the Saudi government – and the country’s men – appear divided on whether it should lift the ban on driving. While the king has made some noises about lifting the ban in 2015, and various men showed their support on Saturday, one particularly enlightened cleric last month said women who drive risk damaging their ovaries and producing children with clinical problems.

Limiting the mobility of women is a time-honored practice in many countries, kept alive and well by politicians and religious leaders pandering for votes and afraid to incur the wrath of the religious conservatives. Clerics in Afghanistan this year barred women from leaving home without a male chaperone. Politicians and police in India advised women to not stay outdoors after dark following a brutal gang rape in Delhi last year. Movements such as Take Back the Night haven’t quite had an impact here; what we really need is more women going for a drive or a walk. Free and unafraid.

Mind the Gap. Your Fortune Depends on it.

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Just a few surprises in the latest Global Gender Gap Report, 2013 released by the World Economic Forum. For the fifth straight year, Iceland tops the list and is followed by its Nordic peers Finland, Norway and Sweden. The surprise is in No. 5: the Philippines. It’s the only Asian country to make the Top 10, and handily beats mightier rivals from Germany to the UK. The U.S. is a distant No. 23, in case you were wondering.

The Philippines has steadily climbed up the ranks: in 2010 it was ranked No. 9 on the index that measures the gap between women and men in terms of economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment. The country is the only one in Asia and the Pacific that has fully closed the gender gap in both education and health, the report said.

Much of the improvement can be attributed directly to President Benigno Aquino, who has appointed women in top posts from chief justice to chief tax collector in a bid to end corruption. He has even taken on the Catholic Church to push through legislation to allow free access to contraception as he seeks to reduce poverty.

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Today, Chief Justice Maria Sereno and the gun-toting head of the Bureau of Internal Revenue Kim Henares, are household names in a country whose most famous – ok, notorious – woman was known only by the extent of her shoe collection.

It’s not all good news, though. While the gender gap narrowed slightly across the globe in 2013, with 86 of 133 countries showing improvements, “change is definitely slow”, the report said. And as for why closing the gender gap is important: it is not only a matter of human rights and equity; it is also one of efficiency.

Little wonder then, that the Philippine economy is growing at more than 7 percent annually – second only to China in the region – and the country has been awarded its first investment-grade rankings by all three ratings agencies this year. Philippine women can take some credit for that.