I generally try to avoid blog posts on women lamenting about their overload of choices. Popular media loves to portray women as ungrateful and indecisive, eagerly waiting to complain no matter what option is made available to them. It just feeds into the stereotype of women being unstable and overly emotional creatures. And it sells papers.
But journalist Mika Brzezinski (try to say that three times fast!) brings to light real questions on real choices women need to make during key points in their lives- career or family?
Of course in this day and age, it is easy to respond with the answer that women can have both. After all, for the modern woman the message that is constantly reinforced to us is that we can have it all.
But it is not so easy. This question of choice has been haunting me more than usual recently. That probably has a lot to do with the fact that I plan on being married soon. I can’t wait to have children, but I also do not have any desire to put an abrupt halt to my professional life. And no one expects me to.
The issue is that I can count how many friends and family members I have who swing both career and family seamlessly. The numbers are not impressive.
One by one women I know had babies, and one by one they fell off their career paths. Either they willingly became hostage to their domestic duties, or they turned into accidental housewives.
I love Brzezinski’s series of posts on the difficult decisions women have to make, but I especially appreciated this one where she speaks so openly and honestly about the challenges women experience in choosing career over family, vice versa, or both. While more options are available to women than ever, there is still some unrealistic and unattainable expectation of being this perfect woman, doing it all, loving it, and of course looking amazing all the while!
It is just not realistic. And it is just not going to happen. Sometimes your choice, or your “poison”, chooses you.
The good news however is that while expectations on women to always do more has not changed, men’s attitudes towards what is expected of them, and what they desire from their wives, has. I love that Brzezinski brings up this point. It is too often overlooked.
Take a few minutes and read Mika’s post. What is your poison of choice?
So it is official: The face of HIV/AIDS is a woman’s face.
Although it was former United Nations’ Secretary General Kofi Annan who made that famous statement a few years ago, the World Health Organization (WHO), confirmed the metaphor last week when HIV/AIDS was identified as the leading cause of death and disease amongst women worldwide, especially in Africa. AIDS is officially a woman’s disease.
The study, the first from WHO on women’s health, highlights “the inequality in health care faced by females of all ages because of poverty, less access to health care and cultural beliefs that put a priority on male well-being.” The virus has the highest prevalence rates in [Sub-Saharan] Africa, where women make up an estimated 57% of adults living with HIV, and three quarters of young people living with disease there are young women aged 15-24.
Dr. Margaret Chan, WHO Chief, said at the launch of the report that, “We will not see a significant improvement in the health of women until they are no longer recognized as second-class citizens in many parts of the world.”
This is a major reproductive health and rights crisis, reflecting the inequality of women globally. Violence against women, poverty, lack of access to education and basic health care services all contribute to making the face of AIDS a woman’s face.
I am normally an optimist when it comes to creating an equal world for women and girls. But this latest study combined with recent developments in the US health care reform makes the politics of women’s health startlingly clear to me.
Let’s talk about the introduction of the Stupack Amendment into the US health care bill for a minute. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, the night before the health care bill passed the House of Representatives, the Catholic Church, with its ever powerful lobby, got this amendment added to the bill which denies women abortion coverage both in public and private insurance plans.
I find it shocking how the health care debate has become such a blatant battle over who dictates women’s fertility. Who really controls women’s reproduction? Who determines our access to contraception? Women certainly don’t. In fact, according to the Guttmacher Institute an estimated 200 million women around the world currently wish to delay or prevent pregnancy, but lack access to contraceptives.
The situation around the world for women and girls is not much better. US foreign policies play a huge role in shaping women’s access to family planning. For example, the US, the largest funder to global health programs, has a $50 billion dollar AIDS initiative called PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) which notoriously promotes the ABC (abstinence, be faithful, and as a last resort use condoms) model in Africa. Imagine an AIDS initiative that promotes abstinence, and not safe sex in the continent with the highest HIV/AIDS numbers in the world!
Today we find ourselves with HIV/AIDS disproportionately impacting women. Feminists have long advocated the fact that women cannot really be empowered until they are in control of their reproduction. In the case of HIV/AIDS, women cannot really protect themselves from this pandemic until their general oppression is addressed. And until women, not men, are dictating legislation which determines how, if at all, our bodies are governed.
*This post of mine was also published on Feministing.
Obama has finally made a decision on Afghanistan which can pretty much be summed up as: “I make no decision and reject all the options you have given me.” Barack just wants to know which way the exit is. So basically the Administration’s decision on Afghanistan for now is more indecision.
While it has become the common desire to bring the troops home and call it a day with the seemingly never-ending Afghan War, support for the war amongst the American public is also at an all time low.
As the Obama Administration ponders the very real possibility of becoming the newest addition to the “graveyard of empires” (aka Afghanistan), there is one aspect of Afghan society everyone seems to have forgotten: the women.
Yes, Afghan women. Anyone remember them? It was only in their name that the war was fought in the first place, right? That and to find Bin Laden in some cave of course.
It was the plight of Afghan women that really served as an emotional tool to garner support for the US Invasion back in 2001. But with the allied forces never really investing accurately in humanitarian efforts on the ground (read: building schools, hospitals, roads), it did not take long for the security situation in the country, which really never extended beyond Kabul anyway, to deteriorate.
When there is no security, there are no women, mainly because they are locked up at home. In the absence of security, nothing much can flourish, especially not democracy. I recently read that one of the best indicators of how safe your society is can be measured by how safe women are.
In the case of Afghanistan, the situation for women has actually worsened under the watch of American soldiers. Violence against women has increased to the point that statistics now show over 70% of Afghan women and girls are victims of violence; girls’ schools are regularly bombed, teachers shot in front of their students, one if four Afghan women die in childbirth, and widespread campaigns exist to make vocal women’s rights voices vanish. Oh and the Taliban, who never really went away, are back. The situation is so bleak that major women’s rights groups, even in the US, have called for a full troop pullout.
But it can’t be that easy for us to wash our hands of Afghan blood. As civilian causalities mount, “smart bombs” continue to miss their target, the US policy in Afghanistan is misguided at best. In order for the US to make its strategy in Afghanistan work, it must take into account the rights of Afghan women and girls whose lives have really borne the brunt of over 30 years of war.
Yes, right now the US is supporting a President who pretty much stole the recent Afghan elections, and only months ago implemented a new law which basically allows men to deny their wives food if they refuse to have sex.
The point I am trying to make though is that while the current US policy in Afghanistan is a disaster, it can never be made right unless women’s needs- healthcare, education, increased political presence- are all seriously improved upon and invested in. And I am talking real basic level investments to start with.
You just cannot really rebuild a society that has seen as much war as the Afghan society by excluding 50% of the population- women. In the case of Afghanistan it is even more important to include women not only because that’s what we said we would do, but because it is the winning strategy.
There is still time to make a war gone/going horribly wrong go right, and that is by working with and investing in Afghan women. As President Obama takes his time and ponders his options, someone needs to bring women back into the equation. Then we can start talking about leaving Afghanistan.
When I first heard about the shootings last Thursday at a military base in Fort Hood, Texas in which 13 people were killed and 30 were wounded, to be honest my initial reaction was, “God help us, not another mass shooting in America.” After all, I hate to say it, but these shootings are becoming increasingly and disturbingly common. I’ll spare you my thoughts on gun control.
However, as the story developed, so did my opinions and fears. The incident has no shortage of shock factors. For one, Major Nidal Hasan, 39 years old, was an army psychiatrist. You would think as a doctor, he would have sought or given himself some sort of professional help. But perhaps the one factoid which stuck with me is the fact that Hasan is Muslim. Once I read that, my heart dropped. The story immediately changed from potentially being just another “lone, crazy gunman on a shooting spree,” to “crazy Islamic fundamentalist, terrorist on a shooting spree.”
It did not take too long for the media to unleash hints of Islamaphobia in its suggestive headlines. But to be fair, those assumptions were and are justified I suppose. There were and are definitely some worrying leads. Reports indicate that Hasan was growing increasingly opposed to the US’ wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, becoming more anti-American. Apparently there were witnesses who even heard Hasan shout “Allahu Akhbar” before he opened fire. Clear indicator that his shooting was in the name of God?
Now there is talk of a serious backlash not only against ordinary Muslims in America, but against the estimated 3,500 Muslims serving in the US military, “prized for their cultural and linguistic knowledge.”
I have to say I was impressed by major Muslim- American organizations not missing the beat, condemning this act of violence right away, and saying it has nothing to do with the teachings of Islam. Hey, at least we are getting better and faster at getting these statements out!
But should Muslims in America be doing more? With every act of violence done in the name of Islam, we bow our heads in shame, brace for the backlash, and hope it will be over soon.
To a large extent, moderate Muslims around the world are just as victimized, if not more, by the fanatical Islamic minority who have done a tremendous job of becoming the mainstream and misconstrued image of Islam. Is it time for moderate Muslims to be more proactive?
I am writing this post after reading this article by Rob Asghar. Asghar asks for deeds, not words from the Muslim community. Though he makes some valid suggestions in his piece, such as setting up charities for communities “hurt by extremists who have hijacked Islam,” I want to know what else can we do? How can Muslims in America, around the world, take a real stand against radical Islam, and not just play the silent victim role?
This story is still very raw, still developing. We do not know all the facts yet. What we do know is that the chairman of the Senate’s Homeland Security committee, Joe Lieberman, has already labeled the shooting as “an act of Islamist extremism.”
I think that it is time for Muslims around the world, especially young Muslims, to start being proactive about what our religion stands for now, and what it will stand for in the future. Think of what the Islam that our children inherit will look like. Our silence condones the violence.
We cannot just continue to brace ourselves for backlash attack after attack. We need to start putting our heads together and come up with tangible solutions. There are only so many statements one can read. After awhile, people need to start seeing the action to match those fancy, official statements.
I will always remember this past summer as the one during which Iran opened itself up to the world. Thirty years of silence since the 1979 Iranian Revolution was shattered when violence erupted on the streets of Tehran over the disputed (read: stolen) elections. There are so many iconic images that came from endless days of protests, exposing to the world how young the Iranian population is (75% are under the age of 25), and as photograph after photograph revealed, how organized and vibrant the women’s rights movement in the country is.
In fact, it is the face of a woman, Neda, that came to symbolize the oppression of a people who have had enough of the Islamic Regime.
I think when it comes to Iran, the world suffers from A.D.D (attention deficit disorder). After weeks of endless coverage on the fallout from the Iranian elections this past summer, it seemed as though Michael Jackson died and took the public’s focus on Iran with him. The regime came down hard on the Iranian people and despite the scores of people, young people, children, and women who were beaten, raped, and killed over their democratic right to protest, the world forgot Iran.
All that changed yesterday. On the 30th anniversary of the U.S. Embassy takeover, the opposition came out in full force to show their on-going rejection of what is an illegitimate government. It was the first strong protest in about two months, a clear reminder to the world that this struggle for democracy in Iran is not over, and the desire is still there.
Neda’s mother also gave her first interview to CNN, where she recounts her daughter’s last moments, and her thoughts on Neda being a martyr for Iran.
Watch the video below and keep up the support for the Iranian movement for democracy- it is alive and well.
Well, unless you live in Iceland. The World Economic Forum (WEF) released its 2009 report on the Global Gender Gap last week, and Iceland is at the top of the list. The country has the highest gender equality index of 134 countries analyzed. According to the Feminist Majority Foundation, the WEF’s “Global Gender Gap Report 2009 determined each country’s rank by “examining how that country has reduced gender gaps in educational attainment, health and survival, economic participation and opportunity, and political empowerment.”
The US ranked 31st, four places down from last year. Melanne Verveer, the United State’s first Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, said at the report’s launch, “Obviously I think every country wants to do better. It’s worth pointing out that no country has equality between men and women, so we have a long road to go no matter where we live.”
So there you go. It is 2009 and nowhere in the world has gender equality actually been achieved. What is important to point out, and often overlooked when reports like this come out, is the violence against women aspect.
It is common to have Scandinavian countries top the WEF’s annual list. The interesting thing is that as these countries get higher in rankings, violence against women also increases. Sweden is an excellent example- great national feminist policies towards women, mainstream feminist political parties, but domestic violence is off the charts. It’s an interesting social aspect which we find often goes hand in hand with women’s economic progress.
Watch Saadia Zahidi, Director of Women Leaders and Gender at the World Economic Forum, speak with Bloomberg’s Margaret Brennan. Although the violence against women point is not brought up, you can watch Zahidi speak about other aspects of the report and its key finding: Around the world, the wage gap still remains wide.
I grew up knowing my country was drowning. My childhood memories are full of flashing images of annual monsoon rains making rivers out of our roads, lakes out of our rice paddy fields, washing away farmers’ harvests, pushing the rural population into our already overpopulated capital city. Of course the yearly floods alternated with even greater natural disasters- cyclones, tornadoes, you name it growing up I saw it. The rumor in the playground was that in twenty years Bangladesh would be completely underwater.
Today that statement is no longer a rumor, but very much a reality. According to the UK’s Guardian publication, Bangladesh makes up not even 10% of the land mass of South Asia , but over 90% of the region’s water passes through it. Experts state that Bangladesh ’s shifting and intensifying weather patterns are making a bad situation worse. The case of Bangladesh shows us that climate change is real, and is already impacting populations and ecosystems around the world.
But the case of Bangladesh shows us something more: That it’s the world’s poor who will feel the impact of this change the hardest. And who exactly are the poor? Women, who make up approximately 65% of the world’s poorest populations.
Because of the traditional domestic responsibilities which fall on women and girls, experts state that climate change is having a disproportionate affect them. Women are the primary caretakers of families, primary managers of everything from food production to water management in their households. As UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) puts it, women are the ones who cook, clean, and farm for their families, in addition to providing health care and hygiene. Women are not only on the “frontlines” of climate change, but their work and relationship with the environment is so intimate that their experience with it changing is often just as personal.
Let’s look at the issue of water for example, a natural resource especially sensitive to climate change, and one that traditionally women are the managers of in their households. According to UNIFEM (United Nations Development Fund for Women), women and girls on average travel 10-15 kilometers, spending up to 8 hours a day gathering water for their families. Droughts caused by climate change are shrinking up and eliminating existing water supplies, making the distance to walk even longer. Because of the distances women and girls have to walk to fetch water for their families, millions of girls around the world are unable to go to school. Imagine that. The average person would never make the connection between accessing water and girls’ education. Yet it exists.
As the gendered impact of climate change becomes increasingly palpable, my question is- where are the feminist voices? Why are more women’s rights advocates and activists not picking up and rallying around this issue vigorously? Everyday you see articles in the news, but where is the real action? More importantly, where is the outrage? Just yesterday I read an article in the LA Times talking about how the newest kind of refugee is not from war, but from of climate change. They are called “climate refugees” and the LA Times states that almost 10million people around the world have been forced to leave their homes for “reasons ranging from rising (or falling) sea levels, lack of rain, and desertification.”
Back home in Bangladesh , the list of innovative ideas to combat and more importantly, adapt to climate change is endless. International aid organizations are working with local NGOs to build “floating villages,” clinics on boats, and help women educate their communities about securing flood and cyclone shelters.
But there has to be more. Women may be in the frontlines of climate change, but they are not only its victims. Their personal and intimate experience of the harsh impacts of climate change means that within them lies very real solutions to combat it. If the voices from the women’s rights movement don’t pick up this issue, loudly, clearly and unanimously, climate change will not only drown out countries, but the agents of change, women, with it. And that is simply not an option.
It is the responsibility of the women’s movement, both here in the US and abroad, to make the issue of our altering environment, our issue, otherwise everybody loses. Climate change is a human rights issue, but its very obvious gendered impacts make it a women’s rights issue.
When the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) took place in Cairo, Egypt in 1994, I was just a schoolgirl in Bangladesh, too young to even begin to comprehend the importance of the gathering which was taking place. It is the fifteenth anniversary of Cairo this year, and it never fails to astonish me how despite having formulated a framework more than a decade ago, it seems as though we are moving farther away from the revolutionary and feminist agenda that was set forth at that UN conference.
Cairo marked a huge victory for feminists. It was when population policies shifted from being about controlling population growth and started being about empowering women. Feminists had long advocated the point that women’s fertility and empowerment went hand in hand: Unless women were in control of their reproduction, they could not really be empowered. If women had access to education and high salaried jobs, they would choose to have smaller families, and fertility rates would lower, thus slowing population growth. Population stability would occur naturally instead of through coercion. The idea was described as a real breakthrough moment in Cairo. This was a major win for feminists who had long urged policy makers to focus on the role women’s empowerment played in population growth.
Objectives were set in order to achieve universal access to reproductive health care by 2015, and donors committed to provide $18.5 billion annually by 2005. As we can all see, that has not happened. Donors have fallen so short of what was promised at Cairo that it is estimated that less than a quarter of what was set out at the ICPD is currently being spent on international family planning assistance.
The World Health Organization (WHO) identifies maternal mortality as a major indicator of women’s overall position in society. The Safe Motherhood Initiative articulates that maternal health is “ultimately related to whether societies invest in and realize the potential of women- not only as mothers, but as critical contributors to sustaining families and transforming nations.”
Indeed the numbers from Women Deliver speak for themselves. It is estimated that one in eight women die in childbirth in Afghanistan. That number in the US? One in 4,800. That number in Sweden? One in 20,000. What do these numbers tell us? That these deaths are preventable. We are not looking for a cure to save women’s lives in childbirth or the complications that may arise from them. It is a question of priority and acknowledgment, plain and simple. It is a question of how much we value the lives of the women in our country, the lives of 50% of our population.
It is 2009 and despite all the advances the world has made in science and medicine, statistics for maternal and newborn deaths are not going down. In the past two past decades, maternal and infant mortality ratios have actually increased in regions such as South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, PAI reports that 99% of pregnancy related deaths occur in the developing world where childbirth is the leading cause of death for women of reproductive age.
Imagine this: Every minute of every day, a woman dies from pregnancy related complications. The Guttmacher Institute states that currently there are about 200 million women in the world who wish to either delay or prevent pregnancy, but do not have access to contraceptives. It is estimated that approximately 530,000 women and girls die worldwide due to complications related to pregnancy, including as many as 70,000 women and girls who die every year from botched abortions.
Even though these statistics are widely used by family planning groups, it is important to remember that these numbers are just estimates. Actual numbers of women dying are much higher when you consider how many deaths go unreported. Child marriage, a common practice across South Asia , is a major but often silent contributor to maternal mortality rates: The risk of dying from complications increases five times for girls under the age of 15 years.
Frustratingly, most people do not even understand the importance of maternal health, or recognize the links between the health of a woman and that of her family, her community, and her country . Children whose mothers are in poor health are less likely to receive education or healthcare. Children who have lost their mothers are more likely to die themselves.
As a Bangladeshi working and living in Washington, it just fascinates me how most Americans are unaware of the far reaching effects of the policies created in Washington . So much power, concentrated in one tiny city. It makes me think of how much advocacy work is being done here by women’s and family planning groups to once again make the US the leader on global reproductive health. US leadership on global health is without a doubt an invaluable and critical asset, but securing women’s access to reproductive health care services goes beyond authoring language in legislation in the fancy marble halls of Congress.
I am sure I have no revolutionary solutions to offer, but I think that dictation on population policies must come from countries like Bangladesh where our maternal mortality ratios rival those of Afghanistan . We should be the authority. Bangladesh is in an excellent position to offer the solutions on population because we are the ones living with the problem at an unimaginable scale.
The Bangladeshi civil society and the non-governmental organization (NGO) sector need to be applauded for their work. I think it is fair to say they have single-handedly taken up the responsibility of prioritizing family planning in the country. Try to imagine where would Bangladesh be today without organizations like the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), the Nobel Prize winning Grameen Bank, or the countless NGOs on the ground? Where would we be without the healthcare workers who travel door to door in our villages distributing birth control?
In Washington, I always hear family planning advocates throw around the word education. It is always education this and education that. I try to make them understand that an illiterate woman in Barisal pregnant with six kids understands that she needs better family planning. She can see she cannot feed her kids and she watches them die. Yes, education is a huge factor but it is not where all our solutions lie.
I think the solution lies within the women’s movement, both in Bangladesh and around the world. I think that this is an issue we must take up and advocate on endlessly and tirelessly until the world gets the point and understands why women’s health should be a global priority. Saving women’s lives is not up for negotiation. The right investments need to be made now in women’s health because we already know what to do and how to do it. We already have the cure. There is no search for a cure like there is for cancer. It is an issue of access . Simple things like increasing the number of skilled birth attendants, increasing their training, making sure clinics are well stocked with the most basic of supplies. It always astounds me that in the “Developed World” if a woman has even the slightest threat of an obstruction in labor, a caesarean section is performed. In countries like Bangladesh , women usually end up with obstetric fistula. Disparities like that should not exist in this day and age. It is needless and it is preventable .
Unless women determine the laws and the policies which will ultimately shape their reproduction, all other women’s rights causes will be lost. Just think if men could get pregnant, how different the world would be. Birth control would probably be available free for all, and abortion would be a birthright.
This year in commemorating Cairo , let us really reflect and uphold the frameworks that were articulated at the ICPD almost two decades ago. It all goes back to what feminists advocated for then and now: Women cannot be empowered until they are in control of their reproduction.
What better time to really win this fight once and for all than on the 15th anniversary of Cairo? We owe to ourselves. We owe it to women and their families everywhere.
This post of mine was also published on Feministing.
