The InterDependent

March is women’s history month, and this year, March 8 also marked the 150th anniversary of International Women’s Day. Mostly, the mood was festive. Women have accomplished a lot. But here’s a reality check: How much are the achievements in women’s rights and participation in daily decision-making still confined to a global minority lucky enough to live in relative affluence, in countries with legal protections and no serious cultural barriers to advancement?

By now it is well known that of all the Millennium Development Goals, a major reduction in maternal mortality is least likely to be met. In other words, pregnancy can be a death sentence. In the rich world – the global north – a woman’s chance of dying in pregnancy or childbirth is, on average, 1 in 3,600. In sub-Saharan Africa, it is 1 in 31. In that region, 38 percent of girls are married, often without their consent, by age 18. In North America (except for Mexico), Europe and East Asia, the percentage is so small it doesn’t figure in statistics.

These data and more than 20 other measures of life across the north-south divide have been collected and displayed on a wall-chart-size table by the Population Reference Bureau, an independent research and information center, and the United States Agency for International Development. The publication, “The World’s Women and Girls 2011 Data Sheet,” draws on the studies of numerous United Nations agencies, among other sources. To read it on the Population Reference Bureau Web site, go to http://prb.org/Publications/Datasheets/2010/2010wpds.aspx.

In shining a light on present inequities, the data sheet also points to dismal futures for millions of women. If only 61 percent of girls in West Africa or 21 percent in Afghanistan complete primary school, what does that say about their prospects for participation in national politics or the economy? If 4 to 6.5 percent of girls aged 15 to 19 in central Africa and 11 percent in Nicaragua give birth in any given year, what are their chances of enjoying any personal independence and long-term good health? Across Europe and East Asia, the figure is 1 percent of girls.

Much of the world could be pretty miserable for millions of women in decades to come because most of the global growth in population, now nearing the 7 billion mark, occurs in the poorest countries, where women have the least power and control over their lives.

Joe Penney

Women in many developing countries have far to go in managing the course of their lives, a new population report finds. Here, visitors at a health clinic in Senegal, where men make more decisions about women's choices than the women themselves do, the survey says.

There is only so much that donor nations, hardworking nongovernmental organizations and UN agencies can do without requiring a far greater commitment from national governments. In many places, that does not exist. Attitudes toward women, and recognizing their vital role in national development, do not usually go beyond speechmaking, signing international agreements without carrying them out and making empty promises to female voters who can actually take part in elections. At least UN Women, the new entity headed by Michelle Bachelet, will be doing a lot of outreach in poor countries, offering an array of services, that could work toward equalizing the status of women.

It is unfashionable in the global North to talk too much about cultural assumptions that hold women down, assumptions that can be changed only by local leadership – social, political and economic. The 2011 data sheet on women and girls has highlighted some of the most crushing cultural notions, based on surveys in many countries. Women themselves express support for these practices, revealing the accepted norm.

Take wife-beating. In Uganda, 40 percent of women say that a man has the right to beat his wife if she argues with him; in India, 30 percent accept that view. (In both countries, oddly, men were slightly less likely to claim that right when asked.) In Uganda 31 percent of women also said that a man had the right to beat them for refusing sex. In Indonesia, where 96 percent of young women are literate and all girls complete primary school, the figure was 7 percent. The correlation is unmistakable.

Or consider other household dynamics. In Bangladesh and Senegal, men made more decisions about women’s health care than the women themselves. This partly accounts for the rapidly rising number of women who clandestinely ask health workers for injectable contraceptives, which leave no traces.

A map on the new data sheet shows the extent of early marriage around the world, another indicator of a bleak future for many females. Child marriage, the Population Reference Bureau says in the accompanying introduction, “poses serious consequences to the health and development of young women and is often a violation of their human rights.”

The highest rates of child marriage are found in regions as diverse as Central America, a swath of middle Africa and South Asia. It is interesting that girls in some major Muslim-majority nations in the developing world, including Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey and most of Central Asia, are more likely to avoid child marriage than neighbors in their respective regions, according to the data sheet map.

Back to the original question: Are most gains for women still happening mostly in rich sectors of society? Statistics would seem to say yes. One example: In countries as different as Bangladesh, Bolivia, Egypt, Nigeria and Mali, the percentage of women in upper-income families who delivered babies under the care of doctors or other skilled medical professionals far exceeds those among the poor or middle-income women who rarely get such health care. Family planning services are also not likely to be readily accessible to the poor and near-poor.

Is it any wonder that maternal mortality, a bellwether for the world’s women, continues to be so high?