Women Inching Toward Equality

Changing perceptions about the role of women in society is a slow process.

It has been only 75 years since women in the United States could vote for the president. It was only 11 years ago that Geraldine Ferraro was the first (and so far only) woman to run for vice president of the United States on a major party ticket.

It was less than three decades ago that women began to anchor network news programs. The sexist wisdom in those days was that women’s voices were too high and, thus, not authoritative enough to speak of serious issues.

Thirty years ago, women couldn’t get financial credit in their own names. And rape victims routinely were seen as having enticed rapists into assaulting them.

Women also routinely were denied the choice of pursuing a career doing “man’s work” such as police officer, firefighter, physician, construction worker, lawyer, soldier, minister and business executive. Today, women fill all of those positions; even the secretary of the Air Force is female.

Despite the slow pace, the changes of the last 30 or so years have been dramatic in the United States. And throughout the world, overall, women have advanced in educational opportunities. They have made gains in new fields of employment. And in health care, positive strides have been made in rising life expectancy rates and declining fertility rates, due in large part to greater access to family planning.

Still, as Ruth Leger Sivard notes in “Women … A World Survey,” there are many ways in which women around the world continue to live in the shadows of inequality, including:

The hourly wages of women in manufacturing average 68 percent of those salaries made by men.

HIV/AIDS infections are proliferating fastest among women.

Women constitute 50 percent of the world’s enfranchised population, but they hold only 11 percent of the seats in national legislatures. In 34 percent of governments, there are no women in the highest decision-making body.

Among the poorest fifth of the world’s population, women who work get no compensation and are not considered to have any economic value.

Of the 2,500 highest-paid executives in the Fortune 500 companies in the United States, less than 1 percent of them are women.

There’s plenty more evidence to show the inequalities between the sexes, including horrible practices such as the genital mutilation of girls in some countries so that they will not enjoy sex and, thus, it is reasoned, will stay faithful to their husbands. In India, brides still are burned if their husbands are disappointed in the dowry. In many places, women must submit to male advances because they do not have the right to say no even if the man is infected with a sexually transmitted disease. And in many countries, young girls still are sold into sexual slavery.

Yet, Sivard reports, there are signs of slow, steady progress toward equality.

Recent firsts include the election of the first woman to public office in Kuwait, the first woman warden of the largest prison in India, women appointed for the first time to the Supreme courts in New Zealand and Japan, the first woman to head the Defense Ministry in Finland, the first woman to run for president in El Salvador, the first woman prime minister in Turkey and the first woman president of the Bundestag in Germany.

Following the list of firsts in Sivard’s book is an apt quotation by Eleanor Roosevelt: “So, against odds, the women inch forward.”

But in undeveloped parts of the world, women still are living in the Dark Ages of the most brutal sexism. For them, it is a matter of life and death that the shadows quickly give way to recognition of their humanness.

Inching forward is not moving fast enough for those women who still are striving toward being treated as full-fledged human beings.

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