I’m getting excited – I am going to break out tonight after midnight. I have a delivery to make. But not only that, but I have a Marmite collection to make. It will be hidden in the bushes for my collection. It feels a bit like the new drug craze. I’ll be able to get back to my soup making tomorrow.
I’m not really looking forward to the topic tonight, SDG 5 – Gender Equality.
It seems like a fairly tame subject for a lot of men in the western world. Unfortunately when you dig in to the details it must be one of the most horrific topics under the SDG. The goal is to “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”, and the targets are:
- End all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere
- Eliminate all forms of violence against all women and girls in the public and private spheres, including trafficking and sexual and other types of exploitation
- Eliminate all harmful practices, such as child, early and forced marriage and female genital mutilation
- Recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and the family as nationally appropriate
- Ensure women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision making in political, economic and public life
- Ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights as agreed in accordance with the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development and the Beijing Platform for Action and the outcome documents of their review conferences
- Undertake reforms to give women equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to ownership and control over land and other forms of property, financial services, inheritance and natural resources, in accordance with national laws
- Enhance the use of enabling technology, in particular information and communications technology, to promote the empowerment of women
- Adopt and strengthen sound policies and enforceable legislation for the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls at all levels
We all know that women are more likely to experience violence in a relationship. But did you know that around one in five women in relationships experience violence of some kind in the relationship? And that one in three women experience physical and/or sexual violence.
There is some good news – the incidence of childhood brides has reduced by 40% in the last 20 years in southern asia. Two thirds of countries have managed to get to gender equality in primary education, and we have doubled the number of women in parliaments over the last 25 years – we only need to double it again to get to gender equality – will it really take another 25 years? Not sure I would have patience.
Universal suffrage is in place in law in most countries, with only Saudi Arabia and Brunei as marked hold outs.
But perhaps the data that causes me most concern is the male/female birth ratio. On average there is expected to be 105 male births for every 100 female births. However the ratio is well out of the average in India, Vietnam, Pakistan, Azerbaijan and China (115 in China). Things have changed in some countries – for example in South Korea the sex ratio of the fourth child had a peak over 240/100 in the mid 90s. Today it is back to 110/100 (for the fourth child).
The practice of sex selection of children does not seem to be clearly proved, but to me it is clearly indicated by the data. A number of studies suggests that there are over 125 million women “missing”.
In the past (up to 1980) nearly all the “missing” women were from sex selective abortions, but after that date postnatal deaths started to rise. Today prenatal and postnatal decisions to terminate a life on the basis of gender are about equal, and total over 3 million a year.
So how do we help. Well this time you can really spend big. You can donate through the Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund, or through the UN Women Trust Fund to Prevent Violence against Women. At this point it is important to support women during the coronavirus epidemic – they are likely to be affected disproportionately.
More to the point what can we do here at home. The graphic above invites us to call out sexism. I’ve seen some cases of sexism in work, and the attempts of men to pit in a “fix”, which seems to be more about identifying the most man-like women rather than facing the sexism built in to the workplace structures. We need to challenge work systems that are testosterone based.