- Kathleen M. Connell
Women and Power: Is the Web the New Key to Global Change and Women’s Empowerment?
- In every part of the globe, women are oppressed by the lack of political, economic or cultural power. And within the women’s community, there are castes of women-by birth, age, skin color, sexual orientation, or other characteristics-who are not treated as full human beings by other women or society-at-large. What are the issues, what are the solutions, and what are examples of women overcoming various shades of gender inequality, against all odds?
(Source: United Nations)
Welcome to my column on The MissStory platform. Women’s voices speaking truth to power online is an opportunity for empowerment. I will be discussing the topic of women and power, and other issues in this space.
Here is what the United Nations says about the global status of women today:
• There is a direct link between increased female labour participation and growth: It is estimated that if women’s paid employment rates were raised to the same level as men’s, America’s GDP would be 9 percent higher; the euro-zone’s would be 13 percent higher, and Japan’s would be boosted by 16 percent.
• Women’s nominal wages are 17 percent lower than men’s.
• In some regions, women provide 70 percent of agricultural labour, produce more than 90 percent of the food, and yet are nowhere represented in budget deliberations.
• In Mexico, women in paid employment devote an additional 33 hours to domestic chores per week, while men’s weekly contribution six hours.
• If the average distance to the moon is 394,400 km, South African women together walk the equivalent of a trip to the moon and back 16 times a day to supply their households with water.
• In Arab states, only 28 percent of women participate in the workforce.
• OECD Official Development Assistance (ODA) for gender equality has tripled in 2006 compared with 2002, going up from US$2.5 billion to US$7.2 billion. This has meant an increase in the proportion of total ODA from 6 to 8 percent.
Impact of the economic crisis on women
• Women constitute around 60–80 percent of the export manufacturing workforce in the developing world, a sector the World Bank expects to shrink significantly during the economic crisis.
• The global economic crisis is expected to plunge a further 22 million women into unemployment, which would lead to a female unemployment rate of 7.4 percent (versus 7 percent of male unemployment).
• Women are concentrated in insecure jobs in the informal sector with low income and few rights; they tend to have few skills and only basic education. They are the first to be fired.”
( Source: Occupy Boston, USA 2011)
In my adult life time, the wage inequality of women has been lessened by only about 25 cents over the last 30 years. Women in the US still make only 75 cents to the dollar of the prevailing male wage. Women’s inequality has led to a dependence on male earners and patrons, which opens the door for vulnerability, low self-esteem and exploitation of women around the world.
This millennia-old problem has also led to sexual slavery, misogynistic politics, policy and treatment of women, double standards for all women, including women leaders.
In politics and in the corporate boardrooms, women are vastly under-represented. The glass ceiling has proved, to a generation of women workers, to be double paned, as even modest advances in the work place and in Congress have created a blow back from the right wing. The Arab Spring and Occupy has produced a web-enabled viral mass movement reborn. Will 2012 be the year of the woman in US politics, thanks to this movement? The campaign wars are on, and we will see in November.
The irony is that thought leaders believe that the empowerment of women, globally, could directly blunt climate change and other global issues. As the UN states about its millennial goals:
“UN Women is one of a number of United Nations agencies charged with supporting countries in moving forward on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The eight goals, adopted by the international community in 2000, set targets for 2015 on eradicating poverty, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and empowering women, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, combating HIV and AIDS and other diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability, and providing financing for development.
All eight MDGs touch essential aspects of women’s well-being, and in turn, women’s empowerment is critical for achieving the goals.”
The Women’s Movement, Reborn: Will We Go Global This Time, Online?
The global recession has brought about a next wave of the women’s movement in the US and elsewhere. Next gen feminists now actually use the term feminist with pride again. The chants at a 2011 Boston Occupy rally are very familiar to long-time women’s activists: “I’m a woman by birth and a feminist by choice!” yelled Boston resident and activist Tyena through a megaphone outside of Quincy Market on a recent Sunday to a crowd. “I am here to tell the church and State House: Get your hands off my body,” she said. “Stop deciding the fate of my body. Sisters, allies – get up, speak up, be heard.”
An entire generation of women is re-igniting a generations-old call for full empowerment. Will they push beyond the barriers, in a new globalized world, to reach new levels of power and equality? It remains to be seen. In short the 2nd wave feminist movement (post suffrage) in the developed world is summarized by one history site in this way:
“The women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s drew inspiration from the civil rights movement. It was made up mainly of members of the middle class, and thus partook of the spirit of rebellion that affected large segments of middle-class youth in the 1960s. Another factor linked to the emergence of the movement was the sexual revolution of the 1960s, which in turn was sparked by the development and marketing of the birth-control pill.”
Reform legislation also prompted change. During debate on the 1964 Civil Rights bill, conservatives hoped to defeat the entire measure by proposing an amendment to outlaw discrimination on the basis of gender as well as race. First the amendment passed, and then the bill passed, giving women a legal tool to finally secure their rights.
Women themselves took measures to improve their lot. In 1966, 28 professional women, including Betty Friedan, established the National Organization for Women (NOW) “to take action to bring American women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now.” By the next year, 1,000 women had joined; four years later membership reached 15,000. NOW and similar organizations helped make women increasingly aware of their limited opportunities and strengthened their resolve to increase them.
Feminism, or organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests, reached a high tide in the early 1970s. Journalist Gloria Steinem and several other women founded a new magazine, Ms., which began publication in 1972. Between 1971 and 1976, Our Bodies, Ourselves, a handbook by a woman’s health collective, sold 850,000 copies.
Some activists pressed for ratification of an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution. Passed by Congress in 1972, it declared, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” Over the next several years, 35 of the necessary 38 states ratified it. The courts also promoted sexual equality. In 1973 the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade sanctioned women’s right to abortion during the early months of pregnancy — a significant victory for the women’s movement.
In the mid- to late 1970s, however, the women’s movement stagnated. It failed to broaden its appeal beyond the middle class. Divisions arose between moderate and radical feminists. Conservative opponents mounted a campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment, and it died in 1982 without gaining the approval of the 38 states needed for ratification.
My own journey of liberation included working on global women’s issues, which was novel in the 1970′s and 1980′s. In the pre-web world, women of all classes and locations attempted to create a global network on women and corporations. Ms. Magazine quoted me and others, in “Life on The Global Assembly Line” a piece by Barbara Ehrenreich and Annette Fuentes. The situation we were seeking to redress then still continues today.
From their 1984 Ms. magazine article:
“Every morning, between four and seven, thousands of women head out for the day shift. In Ciudad Juárez, they crowd into ruteras (run-down vans) for the trip from the slum neighborhoods to the industrial parks on the outskirts of the city. In Penang they squeeze, 60 or more at a time, into buses for the trip to the low, modern factory buildings of the Bayan Lepas free trade zone. In Taiwan, they walk from the dormitories-where the night shift is already asleep in the still-warm beds-through the checkpoints in the high fence surrounding the factory zone….So far, feminism, first-world style, has barely begun to acknowledge the Third World’s new industrial womanpower. Jeb Mays and Kathleen Connell, cofounders of the San Francisco-based Women’s Network on Global Corporations, are two women who would like to change that: “There’s still this idea of the Third World woman as ‘the other’-someone exotic and totally unlike us,” Mays and Connell told us. “But now we’re talking about women who wear the same styles in clothes, listen to the same music, and may even work for the same corporation. That’s an irony the multinationals have created. In a way, they’re drawing us together as women.”
(Image text below photo: Women today on the assembly line at Foxconn, China. Creating the very devices we use to grow our online power. Will these workers participate in the gains? Poor working conditions and suicides in the manufacturing plants used by Apple and other products have been identified, and went viral, thanks to the web. Young women are very nimble and fast. But as they age, the employer often fires them at 25, returning women to poverty, and ending an income the family depends upon.)
Our work on women and corporations in the 1980′s was born from a structural critique, that linked women’s oppression to the growth and power of the emerging multi-national corporations. The same conditions exist today, only with more penetration into every facet of life, and driven by the primacy of profit above all. The web is a tool we did not have in our quiver in the 1st and 2nd wave. The internet is a “disruptive” change in society and will be the key enabler to the next global women’s movement.
The good news is that there are new, disruptive models of participatory governance and markets, all driven by a quest for social equality, and the “triple bottom line” of people, profits and planet.” A global platform that connects us is Kiva, an online micro lending entity. Through those with more can lend to women in the Third World and enable women’s financial well-being, the baseline of political and social empowerment.
(TEXT UNDER IMAGE: Meet Tojiniso, of Tursan-zoda, Tajikistan. She needs just $525 more in mirco loans to grow her sewing business, which supports her family. You can lend to her at Kiva, here.
New social entrepreneurs, including The MissStory, are experimenting with empowering business models that are sustainable financially, and also do not sacrifice truth and liberation in the process. The web makes this possible, and connects us globally in ways not available to women of former generations.
Thanks for stopping by, and I look forward to hearing your ideas and comments on the next frontiers of women and power in the 21st century.
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