Equidad, la clave del éxito

En la foto: Abbas Be
Katy Grannan for The New York Times

Hoy la revista dominical del NYT dedica su número a la mujer. Cómo la liberalización de la mujer puede ayudar a resolver problemas mundiales, desde la pobreza y la mortandad infantil hasta el terrorismo. Se encuentra una interesante entrevista con Hillary Clinton, Secretaria de Estado, sobre la Agenda de Género del gobierno de Obama, cómo planean empujar los temas de derechos de la mujer en la arena internacional. Y un artículo acerca de las "Halconas del Feminismo" en donde se discute acerca de la posición feminista radical (Halcones) de abogar por el uso de la fuerza para liberar a las mujeres de la persecusión y el uso de la burkha haciendo uso del internet y el email.
Un impresionante artículo The Women Crusade de Nicholas D. Kristof y Sheryl WuDunn basado en su libro “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide,” que será publicado el próximo mes. El artículo explica la situación de la mujer en el mundo, específicamente en Asia y África, y comienza afirmando que el siglo 21 deberá ser el siglo en el que se erradique el abuso contra las mujeres y niñas. El artículo cuenta tres historias de mujeres que de las peores condiciones de pobreza, analfabetismo y maltrato han salido adelante gracias a programas de ayuda que se enfocan en "empoderar" a las mujeres, por medio de educación y microcréditos, pero sobre todo enseñándoles que las mujeres somos seres autónomos con derecho a soñar, y cumplir esos sueños. Las historias de Saima Abbas y Tererai no deberían ser motivo de un artículo, deberían ser cosa de todos los días. En el artículo se muestra cómo enfocando la ayuda a las mujeres, los pueblos salen adelante. Un mundo dominado por la testosterona, hace daño a todos.

"WHY DO MICROFINANCE organizations usually focus their assistance on women? And why does everyone benefit when women enter the work force and bring home regular pay checks? One reason involves the dirty little secret of global poverty: some of the most wretched suffering is caused not just by low incomes but also by unwise spending by the poor — especially by men."

Y no se trata de satanizar a los hombres, sino de hacer posible la equidad de género, en la medida en que los hombres y las mujeres tengan las mismas oportunidades, las niñas puedan ir a la escuela igual que los niños, y reciban la misma atención médica y les sean reconocidos los mismos derechos, se creará una sociedad que aprovecha el talento al 100% y no al 50%, como sucede ahora con muchas sociedades que siguen viendo a las niñas como objetos.

Algunos datos:
A study found that 39,000 baby girls died annually in China because parents didn’t give them the same medical care and attention that boys received — and that was just in the first year of life.

In India, a “bride burning” takes place approximately once every two hours, to punish a woman for an inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry — but these rarely constitute news.

100,000 girls were kidnapped and trafficked into brothels.

“More than 100 million women are missing,” Amartya Sen wrote in a classic essay in 1990 in The New York Review of Books, spurring a new field of research. Follow-up studies have calculated the number slightly differently, deriving alternative figures for “missing women” of between 60 million and 107 million.

Girls vanish partly because they don’t get the same health care and food as boys. In India, for example, girls are less likely to be vaccinated than boys and are taken to the hospital only when they are sicker. A result is that girls in India from 1 to 5 years of age are 50 percent more likely to die than boys their age.

More girls and women are now missing from the planet, precisely because they are female, than men were killed on the battlefield in all the wars of the 20th century.

The number of victims of this routine “gendercide” far exceeds the number of people who were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century.

For those women who live, mistreatment is sometimes shockingly brutal. If you’re reading this article, the phrase “gender discrimination” might conjure thoughts of unequal pay, underfinanced sports teams or unwanted touching from a boss. In the developing world, meanwhile, millions of women and girls are actually enslaved.

The International Labor Organization, a U.N. agency, estimates that at any one time there are 12.3 million people engaged in forced labor of all kinds, including sexual servitude.

In Asia alone about one million children working in the sex trade are held in conditions indistinguishable from slavery, according to a U.N. report. Girls and women are locked in brothels and beaten if they resist, fed just enough to be kept alive and often sedated with drugs — to pacify them and often to cultivate addiction. India probably has more modern slaves than any other country.

Another huge burden for women in poor countries is maternal mortality, with one woman dying in childbirth around the world every minute. In the West African country Niger, a woman stands a 1-7 chance of dying in childbirth at some point in her life. (These statistics are all somewhat dubious, because maternal mortality isn’t considered significant enough to require good data collection.) For all of India’s shiny new high-rises, a woman there still has a 1-in-70 lifetime chance of dying in childbirth. In contrast, the lifetime risk in the United States is 1 in 4,800; in Ireland, it is 1 in 47,600.