International Women's Day - stolen parity & minding the gap

“More girls were killed in the last 50 years, precisely because they were girls, than men killed in all the wars in the 20th century. More girls are killed in this routine gendercide in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century.

The equivalent of 5 jumbo jets worth of women die in labor each day... life time risk of maternal death is 1,000 x higher in a poor country than in the west. That should be an international scandal.”

― Nicholas D. Kristof, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

One of the most notorious global crises of our time is the failure of women’s rights – a gendercide as it’s being called. And if Kristof’s statistics don’t put things into perspective for you, then even on a common sense approach there are three readily observable premises to validate that claim:

Fact – women make up half of the global population

The majority of the world population lives in the developing world

The most serious violations of women’s rights occur in the developing world

This International women’s day, I want to reflect on the objective of parity at the most fundamental level. There is a major gap between how I as a female citizen of the free world experience this lack of parity and the experience of how my female counterparts in other parts of the world do.

I know that while I might get off a conference call feeling overlooked in place of the male voices who continue to occupy leadership positions in the corporate world, elsewhere in the world a young girl’s entire dignity and freedom of her own body is not just overlooked but categorically denied as she is forced to allow her body to be violated by as many as 50 “customers” a day.

The fundamental denials of parity occur long before a girl is even brought into this world and continue to threaten her at every stage of her life. I wanted to illustrate the scale and multitude of these very real violations over a trajectory of a women’s life in today’s world:

Pre-birth:

**She may be denied the right to come into existence, it was the nobel-prize winning research of Amartya Sen who first sounded the alarm bells with her 1990 paper entitled “More than 100 million women are missing”. A recent estimate reveals that 24 million girls are missing from today’s population due to sex-selection abortion over the past 14 years, and this doesn’t count abortions of girls due to other reasons such as economic pressure, rape, incest or other factors.

Growing up:

**She is denied her dignity, her freedom, her future, her education: Should she make it into this world, a plethora of other violations await her:

**She may not survive beyond infancy due to malnutrition– the majority of severely malnourished children in India are girls and the research shows that overall in male centric societies like India where little value is placed on female lives, they are far more neglected than their male counterparts, particularly where she has brothers for siblings

**Long before she understands her female body her genital organs will be deliberately mutilated for non-medical reasons - more than 200 million girls and women alive today have been cut in 30 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia where FGM is concentrated^. The practice is mostly carried out on young girls between infancy and age 15.

**She’ll be a bride to an older stranger who’s statistically far more likely to be her abuser than her lover: One third of girls in the developing world are married before the age of 18 and 1 in 9 are married before the age of 15. Pregnancy is consistently among the leading causes of death for girls ages 15 to 19 worldwide. They rarely receive any education and in places like sub-Saharan Africa will often face a higher risk of contracting HIV because they often marry an older man with more sexual experience.

**Should she allow herself to love she may pay with her life: There is an estimated 5000 “honour” killings internationally per year, about every 90 minutes an honour killing unfolds somewhere in the world. In many of the countries where this abhorrent practice is most prevalent, the law not only fails to punish the perpetrators but indeed protects them by upholding it as a complete defence.

**She is no more than her body, and is sold into sex slavery: women and girls make up more than 98% of victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation. It’s the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world, second only to the market for illicit drugs. Recent Australian research on the global numbers reports that almost half of all modern slaves in the world are from India. There are countless stories of girls as young as 5 from rural areas being kidnapped or sold by their own families and trafficked to larger cities where they spend the rest of their life confined in brothels, required to sleep with up to 50 customers and frequently beaten and abused by their captors to ensure submission. Many of these girls contract HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases as there is no right or regard to any form of protection. If they fall pregnant they are either subjected to dangerous abortion methods or forced to give birth within the brothel without any medical attention. The babies are often separated from their mothers and either raised for labour (boys) or future prostitution (girls). Even if these girls manage to escape from the brothel, their families and society are unlikely to accept them back into their home, viewing their forced sexual exploitation as a mark of shame.

3. Motherhood and marriage: Rather than a loving partnership, her marriage will be a life-long entrapment that justifies abuse, degradation and domestic violence:

**Based on WHO data from over 80 countries, globally 35% of women have experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence. Most of this violence is intimate partner violence. Worldwide, almost one-third (30%) of all women who have been in a relationship have experienced physical and/or sexual violence by their intimate partner, in some regions this is much higher. Globally as many as 38% of all murders of women are committed by intimate partners. Given that domestic abuse is one of the most unreported types of abuse, the available statistics are likely to severely understate the scale of actual abuse.

**"Bride burning" accounts for the death of at least one woman every hour in India, and more than 8000 women a year. The heinous practice is financially motivated and is in most cases preceded by a history of abuse of the woman by her husband, mother-in-law or other family members. It's a systematic torturing strategy designed to extract as much "Dowry" from the woman's family for the marriage and culminates in pouring kerosene over the woman and setting her alight. Some perpetrators swiftly re-marry to begin the torture for dowry process all over again, as a legitimate stream of income. Again these women, should they muster the strength to escape from their abusers are often shunned from their own homes for the "disgrace" of abandoning the marriage. Perhaps the most alarming part is that figures indicate that the ancient practice is on the rise.

**She will give her life trying to bring another's into the world. Every day, approximately 830 women die from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. 99% of all maternal deaths occur in developing countries. These are mostly women who go through their pregnancy and labour without any medical assistance. One of the complications that can occur is an obstetric fistula (a hole between the rectum or bladder and the vagina). Without treatment (as is mostly the case in sub-saharan Africa and south asia) the common scenario is that the injury causes ongoing urinal and faecal leakage and sometimes nerve damage immobolising the sufferer and due to the foul smell and perception of uncleanliness, these women are thought of as cursed and marginalised from main stream society. In Ethiopia there are countless incidents of such women (many who were impregnated from rape) being shunned to huts on the outskirts of villages and left for hyenas and other predators to attack.

These violations pervade women at every stage of their life. And while the above certainly makes for a dark picture of our humanity in today's world, there is certainly progress, increased awareness and sure signs of change. Education and empowerment remain the critical priorities to achieve meaningful changes.

As I reflect on how I will never know the injustices and violations that the majority of my female counterparts will, I feel overwhelmingly fortunate for my freedom but I cannot say that I feel grateful for it. It doesn't seem to make sense to be grateful for something that is inherently my right and my most basic entitlement as a member of humankind. My freedom and dignity isn't something that was provided or bestowed by anyone, rather it's what was never taken away. And this is precisely why the struggle for parity is less about asking for equality and is all the more about reminding everyone of what is lacking, what we still need to fight for and rightfully have returned.