Banning child and forced marriages is gaining traction in Africa

Thandabantu Nhlapo, University of Cape Town

The Zimbabwean Constitutional Court has delivered a landmark decision outlawing all marriages below the age of 18. This includes customary marriages.
Predictably, the move generated a great deal of comment and questions. There were even suggestions that the Zimbabwean decision was

the first of its kind in Africa.

Though inaccurate, the claim legitimately marks the issue as a regional and continental problem. In 2015 Unicef released a report on child marriages which highlighted the scale of the problem on the continent.
The reasons for the phenomenon of child marriage are complex and include the fact that in customary law, marriageable age was never reckoned as an actual number but depended on puberty, which was the indication that the girl was now physically able to bear children.

The rights of girls and young women

The debate about the marriage of young girls has been raging for years in South Africa. It reached a new pitch after a visible spike in the abduction of girls, ostensibly for the purposes of customary marriage, in certain areas of the country.
The perpetrators claim to be practising the custom of ukuthwala. Typically, these abductors force themselves sexually on girls as their “brides”. In some instances the girls are as young as between nine and 14 years old.
In many cases this is justified on the basis that some money or other material consideration has been paid to the parents. This is a vile distortion of the custom of ilobolo (dowry). Parents living in poverty are thus frequently complicit in this human rights violation.
In 2015 in the case of Mvumeleni Jezile v. The State the Western Cape High Court confirmed a 22-year sentence of imprisonment against the adult abductor of a 14-year-old girl under the guise of the ukuthwala custom.
The accused had been charged with several crimes arising from his actions. These included three counts of rape and one count of human trafficking, all of which the appeal tribunal upheld.
A further development in 2015 was the publication by the South African Law Reform Commission (SALRC) of its Revised Discussion Paper on Project 138: The Practice of Ukuthwala.
The Revised Discussion Paper contains a draft Bill, tentatively titled the Prohibition of Forced Marriages and Child Marriages Bill, which is being taken around the country as part of a public consultation process.
The Law Commission is aiming for wide public engagements, particularly with government departments, police services, traditional leaders and rural communities. It also wants to attract commentary from NGOs, other civil society organisations, as well as religious organisations, educators and ordinary citizens.
After these steps, the Law Commission will submit a report to the minister of justice in the hope that the cabinet will give approval for it to be passed into law.
The Bill specifically criminalises forced marriages as well as child marriages. Both are already prohibited by the provisions of the Recognition of Customary Marriages Act. The Act has, since 1998, required not only that customary marriages be conducted only with the consent of the partners, but also that the parties should be at least 18 years old.
The Bill lists the existing crimes of abduction, kidnapping, human trafficking, rape and assault as possible verdicts in such cases. It also explicitly strips protection away from these criminal actions that might be claimed under custom or culture practices.
This points immediately to the difficult issues in this debate.

Clash of cultures

For many women’s rights activists, practices such as ukuthwala should be banned in their entirety as being generally inimical to human rights, particularly those of women and the girl child.
On the other hand, cultural activists make the point that the laws of the land are already adequate to target these crimes masquerading as custom. They also argue that it seems arbitrary and discriminatory to treat crime in urban areas as such and suddenly call it “culture” when it occurs in rural areas.
This conflict is but the tip of the iceberg in a country deeply embroiled in increasingly acrimonious contestations between cultural rights and western law.
At the heart of the disputes is something more than the so-called clash of cultures. Some serious misgivings are beginning to emerge about the lack of depth in the national debate about the complexities, sometimes quite intractable, of recognising and accommodating difference while promoting a single nationhood.
Unity in diversity is a nice slogan, but the ideal appears horrendously difficult to realise in practice.
For every opponent of ukuthwala, there will be someone who will remind us that, in its earlier form and function, the practice could have been seen as a subversive avenue empowering youngsters to resist parental authoritarianism. In such cases, the parties were usually consenting lovers of marriageable age who had reason to defy parental expectations and where sex was not sanctioned.
Similarly, criminalisation by the state often ignores the complicity of family in these times of abject poverty. A significant obstacle to the reporting of these perversions is usually the reluctance of the victims to send their own parents to jail, often rupturing the extended family in the process.
Add to this toxic mix the emotions generated by different interpretations of the Constitution by people and organisations with different agendas, and it becomes clear that the Law Commission has its work cut out in attempting a solution without exacerbating already divisive fault lines.

Thandabantu Nhlapo, Emeritus Professor of Private Law, University of Cape Town
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Women in science: equality is impossible unless society shifts

Emanuela Carleschi, University of Johannesburg

There’s a lot more good news for women in science than you might expect. Research shows that the landscape for women working in scientific disciplines – including maths, engineering and technology – has improved dramatically over the past 50 years.
Gender representation and sexism are taken far more seriously than used to be the case. Behaviour that may once have been swept under the carpet is now openly and roundly condemned.
A Nobel Prize-winning scientist, Sir Tim Hunt, resigned in 2015 from University College London in the wake of a sexism row. Also in 2015, renowned astronomer Geoff Marcy quit the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, after being found guilty of sexually harassing women students. And the world’s most important science journals have dedicated entire issues to gender and equality concerns.
These sea changes have been largely driven by three factors: the general advancement of women in society; the implementation in many countries of gender-sensitive policies designed to attract more women to the sciences; and, as illustrated above, a growing awareness in the global scientific community about the realities of gender bias.
But, as the world celebrates International Women’s Day on March 8, it’s worth exploring what still needs to be done – and whether science can ever be a truly equitable space while society more broadly is not.

No gender parity yet

The United Nations’ 2016 theme for International Women’s Day is:

Planet 50-50 by 2030: Step it up for gender equality.

This is linked to the UN’s Agenda 2030 and its Sustainable Development Goals. Scientists still have a long way to go before hitting the 50/50 mark for women’s representation.
The problem starts from student years: women are significantly more likely to drop out of science careers at doctoral level than their male counterparts.
Beyond university, women scientists remain in the minority. The most recent UNESCO Science Report shows that only about 30% of the world’s researchers in science, technology, engineering and maths are women.
Their under-representation is even more pronounced when one considers rank – women are far less likely to become full professors in these fields, to become members of the prestigious Academy of Science or to sit on scientific journals' editorial boards.
So what is holding women back in university classes and research labs? A number of studies have suggested the following factors:

• gender bias at graduate level;
• unconscious gender bias in applying performance and promotion evaluation criteria;
• a disparity in funding awards – men get more funding to conduct research that will go on to boost their professional reputation;
• a lack of institutional support for women; and
• more personal and cultural aspects such as the idea that women must put their families first and take on more domestic responsibilities than their male colleagues.

So: we know that gender bias in science is real. We know that it must be addressed. But are scientists focusing too much on trying to patch up what is actually broader societal damage? Scientific research and endeavour doesn’t exist in a vacuum: it is being conducted in a world full of gender bias.

Women must feel free to take risks

As a student, I was extremely shy and barely ever asked questions during lectures.
I see the same thing happening now that I am a lecturer. Female students don’t ask a lot of questions. Nor do they take risks by challenging my assertions or questioning me closely about something they don’t understand. This is what happens when you’ve been raised in a patriarchal society – and most are – that discourages women from asking questions or standing out in any way.
It has been reported that girls’ lack of self-confidence directly impacts their performance in school maths and science.
This doesn’t surprise me. After all, science is based on engaging with a process of trial and error. Self-confidence gives a person the freedom to allow themselves to fail, take risks and not fear getting things wrong.
Those risks are bound to increase as one climbs the ladder to become a principal investigator or group leader on a research project. Leadership and decision-making are based on both competence and self-confidence.
Women certainly don’t lack the former. Employers, institutions, lab managers and colleagues all have a role to play in making work a safe space for women scientists to take risks without feeling judged.

A far bigger battle

This is the heart of the matter. As long as scientists focus only on individual episodes of gender bias in their fields – or in any other facet of human life – not much will really change.
Science exists in a social and cultural context that prioritises men over women. While women are still undermined, discriminated against, denied access to education and paid less than men, there cannot be true equality in science.

Emanuela Carleschi, Senior Lecturer in Condensed Matter Physics, University of Johannesburg
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Feminism has failed and needs a radical rethink

Eva Cox, University of Technology Sydney

There was a 1970s badge that declared:

Women who want equality with men lack ambition.

This statement neatly sums up the broad intentions of second-wave feminists to create radical shifts of gender power. On International Women’s Day 2016, looking back, I suggest we failed to pursue that agenda and settled for much less. We achieved formal legal equality over the subsequent decade, but moving past that into wider social equity changes seems definitely to have stalled.

What went wrong?

We knew then that legal equality was only the starting point. We understood that real gender equity would require radical changes to macho cultural power structures. So we planned and discussed the ways we could revalue what matters and eliminate gender-biased, macho-designed cultural dominance.
Despite fixing most of the legal barriers, the cultural changes failed to follow. There were other changes happening. By the 1980s the arrival of neoliberalism as the dominant political paradigm slowed most social progress, as market models took over. These changed the political focus from progressive social change to market choices and individualised material success.
This approach also emphasised machismo and reinforced gender inequities, because market competition rewards materialist views of what matters. The more collectivist social roles that are part of our social infrastructure – and often heavily feminised – are devalued and considered private concerns.
Our early support for increasing the proportion of women in positions of power was not driven by wanting more women sharing male privilege, but a belief that feminists could infiltrate and make the social and cultural changes we wanted. Now, the increasing numbers of women allowed to join men in positions of power and influence are mostly prepared to support the status quo, not to seriously increase gender equity.
So 41 years after International Women’s Year, Australian women are still the very much the second sex, insofar as we are permitted limited share of power and resources in the public sphere, but on macho market terms.
What is the second sex? It was neatly defined in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex analysis of how gender roles were socially designed:

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

and

She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.

Still the second sex

In Australia, women are still clearly the “other”. Our once radical social movement has been diverted into good works such as women’s refuges, counting female victims of violence and calling out sexism. While all these are necessary, there is little focus on offering serious alternatives.
Too many women’s groups are plaintively asking for better access to the options open to men, on men’s terms. The current groups seem to have lost the necessary optimism to identify and lead serious changes to the nasty, inequitable and fading market model which not only excludes the social but is showing serious flaws.
The damage to social well-being that results from the reliance on unfettered markets is much wider than just the continued poor status of women. There are clear indications of social distress in many developed countries whose austerity cuts have created serious inequality.
A review of current public policy priorities at the local level shows few social goals and policies that indicate any serious efforts to make Australia fairer and create better social well-being. The long-term over-emphasis on GDP and financial growth is exacerbating inequalities, with changes focused mainly on punishing the unemployed.
The market model stresses paid work only, completely ignoring feminised unpaid, underpaid, often uncounted roles and tasks, most notably the raising of children. These are not included in GDP, but are essential to good social functioning.
This shift is clearly illustrated by proposed changes to the funding of children’s services, whose role will move from complementing community/family to servicing GDP growth. In the process, “progress for women” has been reduced to increasing their participation in paid work.
This pattern appears in parenting payments and other areas where unpaid contributions are ignored. Similar issues arise in Closing the Gap failures, which emphasise white male models and ignore the value of good social relationships that were once also more important in Western societies.

Time for a radical rethink

In the lead-up to the 2016 election, voters increasingly distrust the major parties, whose economic emphasis turns them off. Rather than leave solutions to the current holders of power, or some populist alternatives, we need feminist-led setting of social equity goals.
Can some good feminist ideas reignite the light on the hill to find ways out of current political dilemmas? Let’s commemorate International Women’s Day this year by offering some bold initiatives that show our concerns are universal, albeit from feminist standpoint. Here are some starting points:

• devise and discuss good social policy goals, which prioritise gender and other equity outcomes, and make them central to the coming election;
• revalue the rewarding the skills and time put into care, relationships, feelings and other social needs that require attention and commitment;
• broaden the agenda and revise our assumptions about what matters to make sure that gender biases are removed from roles such as caring;
• ensure that men recognise their need to be liberated from the limited assumptions about masculinity that also limit their choices and lives;
• abolish the term “women’s issues”: these are social issues that affect everyone, and the label stereotypes women as the second sex who have special interests; and
• acknowledge that women cannot “have it all” because men can’t either, but ensure that both can take on fairly shared responsibilities for essential paid and unpaid roles.

These are starting points for addressing deficits in mainstream politics and putting social well-being high on political agendas. We require feminist perspectives to set social goals that are sustainable, and create social resilience.
These necessary strengths are undermined by the macho tendencies in current political directions. We need to recognise the importance of social connections, cultural needs and care of others that economics doesn’t cover; to balance material and social stability.
And, as de Beauvoir said, women need to decline to be the “other”, to refuse to be a party to the deal. This would mean for women to renounce all the advantages conferred upon them by their alliance with the superior caste. That’s feminism.

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Eva will be on hand for an Author Q&A between 3:30 and 4:30pm AEDT on Tuesday, March 8, 2016. Post your questions in the comments section below.

Eva Cox, Professorial Fellow, Jumbunna IHL, University of Technology Sydney
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Sexist screen representations of women start in the script

Radha O'Meara, University of Melbourne

The issue of poor female representation in movies has been examined from many angles, from the lack of women in positions in power to investors wary of female-led films. But do the problems start before the cameras begin to roll?
How female characters are described in screenplays is rudimentary compared with how male characters are described. In other words, representations of women are poor before they even make it to the screen.
This issue recently came to the fore with the Twitter feed @FemScriptIntros, where American film producer Ross Putman tweets the first description of female characters in unproduced scripts he reads, anonymised with the character name JANE.
It received a bunch of media attention last week. This Twitter feed effectively demonstrates a pattern:

Given that casting calls are usually copied from scripts, these flimsy characters have a real impact on the development of the show.
Let’s take a closer look by comparing how female and male characters are described, and by exploring the implications this has for screen production.
Screenplays comprise two main components: dialogue and scene text, that describes the characters, setting and action. We’re concentrating here on the scene text; it’s already well known that male characters dominate dialogue on screen.

The cast of West Wing have very different 

character descriptions. Warner Bros.

It’s fairly common for female characters in screenplays to be described only or primarily in terms of their looks. Film and television are visual media, to be sure, but male characters are usually described visually and in terms of their character, attitude, and personal qualities
In the pilot episode of The West Wing by Aaron Sorkin, Leo Jacobi is introduced as “55 and professorial” and on the following page CJ Cregg, played by Allison Janney, is described as “38, compact and athletic".
In the ensuing pages, Donnatella Moss is introduced as:

25 and sexy without trying too hard, DONNA is devoted to Josh.

Her boss Josh, on the other hand, is,

A youthful 38, JOSH is Deputy Chief of Staff and a highly regarded brain.

It is clear that women in The West Wing are valued for their physicality and service to men, but men are respected for their intellect.
For many female characters, they are introduced only as an appurtenance to a male character. In Donald Margulies’ The End of the Tour, male lead David Lipsky is described as:

A boyishly handsome forty-three, quick-witted, tightly-wound, smokes and types speedily from scraps of handwritten notes, surrounded by books on his current journalistic subject, climate change.

The female lead is described simply as:

his pretty girlfriend.

In Legend (2015), the story of London mobster brothers written by Brian Helgeland, Reggie and Ronnie Kray are introduced on the first page with both character description and voice over narration explicitly describing them for the audience.

Actress Emily Brown plays Frances Shea in Legend (2015). StudioCanal

By contrast, when the principal woman is introduced in this screenplay, she is described only as “the future Mrs Kray.” Apparently there is nothing to her, but who she will later marry.
Sometimes, the female characters are barely given any description at all. Shasta Fay Hepworth speaks on screen for the first five minutes of Inherent Vice (2014), by Paul Thomas Anderson, but the only description of her is a vague age: “20s”.
Similarly, Nancy appears on about 20 pages of the script for Foxcatcher (2014) by E Max Frye and Dan Futterman, but she is never given a character description at all.
It is hard to know what to make of the lack of description given many female characters: on one hand, it means the role is open to interpretation; on the other hand, it leaves a concerning whiff that all women might be generic or interchangeable, entirely defined by their gender.
So far I have concentrated on descriptions of named characters, as the nameless are considered very minor parts and may be cast by extras. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that minor male characters are more likely to have names than equally minor female characters.
In the opening pages of Kill the Messenger (2014) by Peter Landesman, a pair of minor characters is introduced: one is named and described,

RONNY QUAIL, 40, nose collapsed from a lifetime of blow

Whereas the other’s description becomes nominalized:

LITTLE HOTTIE, 19, topless and G-string.

He is a person with an affliction. She simply is her sexualised body. (Her character name in the Kill the Messanger IMDB page is “Quail’s Girlfriend”.)
It’s worth pointing out here that playing the role of a named character commands a higher level of pay than playing an unnamed extra.

Sienna Miller’s character in Foxcatcher, Nancy Schultz, was not described in the screenplay at all. Sony

Major characters in a screenplay are more than just a pithy introduction: they are created through an accumulation of description, action and dialogue over dozens of pages.
But male characters also dominate screen time. Many female characters often sit on the narrative sidelines watching the action driven by male characters, so their introductory description may take on greater significance.
Why does it matter how female characters are described in scripts for film and television? Because a screenplay is usually the basis for screen production, and film and television both reflect and shape our society.
Character descriptions are often simply lifted from scripts and posted as casting calls. Accordingly, female performers may be cast simply because they fit a certain physical description. Of course, they may put in considerable work to build a character without direction from the page, but this contributes to the difficulty actresses report in finding good roles.
Lengthy descriptions in a script also translate to a lingering camera, so when men are described in more detail, they will also spend more time on screen.
The screenplays chosen here have all been successfully produced and lauded with nominations or awards. These are supposedly the best that Hollywood has to offer, so should provide good examples of how to write women. But they do not.
More importantly, this issue is broader than any single screenplay. Women are systematically marginalised on screen and these character descriptions are only one indicator of that.
Ultimately, how women are described in screenplays matters, because screen representations contribute to the normalisation of sexist gender roles in our society.

Radha O'Meara, Lecturer in Screenwriting, University of Melbourne
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Alanis Morissette: Feminism Needs a Revolution

TIME

Often when I’m being interviewed about my career and music, I'm asked whether I am a feminist. What the interviewer means depends on who’s doing the asking and what their take on the feminist movement is. Sometimes it’s rhetorical. Other times, a thinly veiled indictment. My answer is always yes. I have never been apologetic about this, but rather deeply passionate. It is an honor to be considered a feminist.
The concept of feminism to me is a mandatory link in a chain toward wholeness, cohesion, maturation and functionality—certainly the feminist movement is one of the most powerful means to this greater end. I do believe, however, that the definition of feminism needs some refocusing, redefining and updating for this modern time, and for this new generation, and that the movement deserves a reorienting, intentionality and re-envisioning for what is possible and how to get there. We need a revolution to the feminist revolution. And it needs to be brought to the fore of our awareness in order to heal what ails our times on this planet.
Here's why: So much of the movement has been about (often willfully, and for good reason) forcing justice upon a patriarchal system that too often reduces the feminine to maintain the reign of the disempowered masculine. The patriarchy has always seemed an ignorant and emotionally immature purgatory at best, and, at worst, a liminal despair-filled holding pattern carefully held together by resistance, hate, hostility and separatism—the cost of which is felt across every area of life, in women and men alike.
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This patriarchal acting-out is ultimately an indication of our collective spiritual and emotional immaturity. And if we are to heal our way out of this disconnected way of living, we would have to heal by growing our undeveloped aspects of ourselves, and take that healing process very seriously. Regardless of our past, of how we were raised, of the many valid reasons why we remain arrested at various immature past stages of our development, if we chose not to heal or grow out of having been frozen, nothing can change within the patriarchy, and ultimately, nothing can change in the world around us. It is up to us, collectively, to move into this inquiry of how to grow parts of us that never had a chance to when we were young.
Patriarchy may afford a false sense of power afforded to those who keep the hate in place, but that power is temporary and false, and it will never yield the peace and well-being that is not only possible but is every person’s birthright. The water of what is possible through accepting the goal of wholeness by embracing the feminine still rushes powerfully as the dam of patriarchy stays willfully (if not temporarily) frozen in place.
While I have had my share of challenges with the male species, outright radical man-hating—regardless of how much it has been projected onto me because I wrote a song called "You Oughta Know" about being devastated by a break-up—has never been my pervasive thing.
In fact, if I were to add anything to my personal exuberant sense of being a feminist, it would be that feminism is incomplete without its dualistic brother, its complement, and, ideally, its greatest supporter: the empowered masculine. Developing the capacity to separate the masculine from the man and the feminine from the woman has served me well in understanding the continuum of both qualities. Whether this is indicated in our choices sexually, physically, emotionally, vocationally or artistically, we are moving ever closer to getting a real sense of who we are as humans based on where we fall on this continuum. Man or woman, we are all a little bit of both masculine and feminine, in degrees that vary from one person to the next. And the degree to which we embrace these qualities within us dictates our level of personal agency, esteem and freedom in our lives.
In this sense you might call me a humanist, or better yet, a “wholeness-ist.” As it turns out, embracing the breadth of both sets of qualities that we have within us, regardless of what the context (aka society) says it expects of us or not, is the work of brave front-line activism. Who knew that to be who we truly are would be an act of rebellion in the world?
The delicate and powerful outcome of what happens when the feminine and the masculine work in tandem is what I am interested in, and with whatever percentages of each that each human being naturally evidences. What is inherently required in the beginning of the journey of embracing true gender-equality is the long overdue respect for and consideration of and credence due to the feminine, to females and to more feminine males. There has been so much death, mutilation, annihilation, reduction, aversion and obliteration of the feminine and the female/feminine body as has been evidenced with female genital mutilation, sex trafficking, hyper-sexualization in entertainment and pop culture, LGBT hate, unequal pay, lack of education about the female body, public shaming, bashing and bullying, and to know it is still happening across the planet on a daily basis is nothing short of soul-killing and archaic. Watching this within, without and about this life has left me unable to put this existential pain and despair into words. But I cannot push it aside. It is with this crack in my soul that I persevere alongside so many toward the greater goal of arriving at our wholeness as a species.
In more Westernized places, today, after many years and chapters of tireless effort, women can be presidents (if still frequently challenged on the basis of their gender) or CEOs (if still having had to work 10 times harder than men to get there) or movie stars (if still having to fight to earn anywhere near the same wage as their male co-stars), or play the natural roles that they were born to play with less resistance. Could this in fact be proving that the days of the egregiously polarized masculine and feminine are slowly tip-toeing toward the light at the end of the tunnel of unification or integration of both these parts? Painstakingly slowly, to be sure.
If the goal is less polarization and the greater acceptance of the masculine and the feminine qualities in all of us, then the goal being in sight might well be the gift that this new generation and new era is offering. And our eyes cannot avert from this prize if we truly want peace within and without on this planet.
We must infuse this feminine movement (as I prefer to call it) with a new clarity and passion, coming at it from another angle, thinking of this across-the-world challenge as more of a question—how can we move both the feminine and the masculine toward greater maturity and empowerment? For if patriarchy (disempowered masculine) relies on a silenced and reduced feminine (disempowered feminine), then true empowerment is an internal movement toward maturation and healing, and renewed defining of personal power and responsibility and a re-working of what it means to achieve success on this planet. And it is asked of both genders alike. It is an inside-out shift that would change everything we see around us—toward acceptance and allowance, sure, but also towards support, appreciation, honor and connection.
The unification conversation would have to continue in earnest, not just put a stop in the gap, only to spring another leak. If the false messages and choices born from a disempowered masculinity are not arrested at their root, we are merely putting out a small flame while the rest of the forest burns down.
The saying “that which we resist persists” applies here: Hating men for the oppression we as women have experienced—a justified rage and retaliation in so many regards, and Lord knows I have enjoyed my cushion on this bandwagon—just keeps the gender and gender-quality divide ever entrenched.
We must take our passion and energy for the lunacy of this reductivism and channel it toward change: addressing first, the egregious lack of celebration of the feminine and all feminine qualities; and second, and equally important, the redefinition of what empowerment looks like in the masculine.
In areas of the newly empowered masculine, things like competition, and the divisive mindset that competition requires would quell. The sublimation of emotions and the rewarding for that would wane, and men and women alike would be less resistant to the natural flow of emotions that course through their bodies every day, serving as intuitive indications to be investigated, versus sensations to be obliterated through stoicism or medicating. Aggression would be used when appropriate (during a workout, or while climbing a mountain, or while lifting something heavy while serving the whole), and the propensity to serve and protect would be geared toward those who warrant this provision and protection: the feminine within and without, and the more vulnerable. Basically, we would notice our collective eye moving more toward the success and well-being of the WHOLE, rather than the scarcity-fueled stronghold of abundance of the few.
In areas of the newly empowered feminine, abilities like submission would be used in its proper and appropriate contexts, surrendering and faith and dropping arms would be valued as deeply wise, and vulnerability and innocence would be seen as our natural innate qualities, and would be powerfully guarded as such. “Weakness” would be more respectfully associated with yielding (a deeply intuitive ability) or resting (an underrated action in today’s work addicted world) or humility, with humility serving as a portal to our own sense of spirituality—a lost goal in a world obsessed with industry and “might being right.” World leaders of both genders would be oriented toward teaching and modeling healing and inspiring a less punishment-oriented but more cause-and-effect consequence experiencing version of responsibility-taking—sure signs of the focus on supporting the emotional, psychological and spiritual maturation of the planet’s people.
There would be many changes that we would see all around us—some subtle, and some that would tip the world on its axis financially and politically. Many more opportunities would open up for both genders. There would be a planetary healing, a tenderness, a repair, a recovery, a sense of things returning to “how they were meant to be,” a homecoming. People could actually be who they truly and authentically are.
Flying in the face of our deeply entrenched survival strategies and long-held defenses (life-supporting when we were young, turned life-denying as we grow into adulthood) and prejudices is not for the weak of heart. When glimpses of a new way to live occur, it is truly a powerful and light-filled sight to behold. We have already seen it take shape in fits and starts in this new generation and in our culture: More fathers being supported. Fewer power-struggle-filled forms of parenting and relating. More emotional literacy. More masculine-oriented women having the careers that they have dreamed of since they were very young. More empowered men supporting empowered women. More diversity. More acceptance of personal lifestyle and sexual preference choices. More connection. More responsibility.
The feminist credo being evidenced everywhere around the planet relies solely on our emotional, spiritual and psychological maturation. The degree to which the feminine imperative is lived is commensurate to the degree that our consciousness is raised. And we raise our consciousness by taking responsibility for our own healing and reparation of wounds from our past, and cultivating the ability to regulate our nervous systems in an overstimulated world.
A focus on empowered versions of both the masculine and the feminine will serve us better than having either quality be seen as better or worse than the other. We need both. And that is why I see the feminine movement as the next step in our evolution toward liberation on this planet. We bring the feminine up to her rightful seat. And the masculine to its rightful seat next to the feminine. This is my prayer. This is my wish. This is my mission. And it will require both the masculine and feminine qualities in me to continue to move toward it alongside so many other people with the same vision. May our steps continue to be guided by our vision of wholeness, connection and deep peace.

The forgotten women of Syrian war

BY

İlnur Çevik FOR DAILY SABAH

The women of Syria have always been second class citizens in a world of men. Thus they have nothing to do with the intricacies of the Syrian civil war and yet they are the ones who are forced to shoulder the massive burden of violence and destruction as they become migrants and seek salvation in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon

International Women's Day is hardly a day to celebrate when there is a huge chunk of the world's female population facing gender problems and so many of them are victims of not only social violence but male-instigated wars, massacres, terrorism, hunger and famine while they try to shield their children from the destruction.

What is really sad is that everyone sees the plight of the Syrian women, who have to face the consequences of the civil war in their country, and hardly anyone does anything about it.

Last year the international conference on women at the United Nations talked about women's issues at length but there was hardly a mention of the Syrian women who brave the ills of the civil war while they also try to tend to their children. Let us hope this year's conference will be different.

The women of Syria have always been second class citizens in a world of men. Thus they have nothing to do with the intricacies of the Syrian civil war and yet they are the ones who are forced to shoulder the massive burden of violence and destruction as they become migrants and seek salvation in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon. They go where their men drag them. Some are left on their own with their children and have to brave adverse conditions to survive.
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Turkey has done its fair share for the refugees by taking in 3 million Syrians including women and children. They are hosted in tent cities and in dwellings all across the country. Turkey has spent $9 billion for the Syrians so far. That has made Turkey the third highest donation-making nation in the world. There are at least 500,000 children who need proper educational facilities and Turkey is involved in a massive operation to provide all these.

But despite all this no one can deny that the suffering of Syrian women continues not only in Turkey but also in other parts of the world as they try to seek refuge and shelter, especially in Europe.

The scenes of desperate Syrian women and children trying to brave the waters of the Aegean Sea are splashed on the front pages of newspapers around the world. The way the Syrian women and children are pushed around at the borders of Macedonia, Greece and Hungary have become a source of great shame for humanity. Yet, European leaders are still trying to get their acts together to help the Syrians out of this mess. They could not agree on setting brave proposals presented to them by Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu on Monday night that are designed to ease the crisis of the Syrian migrants. Turkey has said it will help clear out the Aegean islands of migrants, it is ready to take back all the illegal migrants that have tried to slip into Europe, provided they too take in real Syrian migrants. Turkey has said it wants 6 billion euros of European Union grant money until 2018 to enhance the living conditions of the Syrians in Turkey, provide them with proper social facilities and schooling for their children. Other countries in a similar position with such a massive influx of migrants would be hopping mad, saying they do not want these people. Yet the Turks have shown they are people of deep humanitarian values and have embraced these people for the past three years. Turkey deserves to be treated like an EU member state in view of all this.

Yet we see European leaders still in disarray with "ifs" and "buts." Turkey has taken a courageous stance, the EU leaders should at last show some kind of responsibility to live up to the norms of being civilized Europeans for the sake of the Syrian women and children who are victims of the civil war and Syrian leader Bashar Assad's tyranny.

International Women's Day - AfDB Calls for Safe Cyberspace for Women

The African Development Bank's East Africa Regional Resource Centre (EARC), is hosting a forum in Nairobi, Kenya, on the theme "Making the Internet a Safer Place for Women" to mark International Women's Day on March 8.

The event will bring together the donor community, key government officials, United Nations, private sector, civil society, and academia, among others. The forum will explore the magnitude of cyberspace gender violence, and discuss possible measures that can be implemented to protect women and children from abuse. Solutions will be sought on how to make technology, and the internet in particular, a safer place where more women can fully utilize and harness the power of ICT for their social and economic development.

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The AfDB Vice-President and Special Envoy on Gender, Geraldine-Fraser Moleketi, and the EARC Director, Gabriel Negatu, alongside Kenya's Inspector General of Police, the UN Country Director for Kenya, among others, will participate in the event. The forum will launch a program that sensitises and empowers the Kenyan police and judiciary to better handle crimes related to gender-based cyber violence. The initiative is a joint partnership between the Bank and Facebook.

A policy brief based on recent research conducted on gender-based cyber violence in Kenya will also be unveiled at the meetings. The document highlights the fact that gender-based cyber violence is a human rights violation.

The 2016 theme for International Women's Day is "Pledge for Parity". It implores all individuals to join forces and help women to realise their full potential.

Africa: Celebrities Urge Leaders to Put Girls At Heart of Anti-Poverty Drive

By 

Emma Batha

London — Chat show queen Oprah Winfrey, actress Meryl Streep and singer Elton John called on Monday for world leaders to put girls at the heart of anti-poverty efforts as a new index revealed Niger was the toughest country to be a girl.

In an open letter, published on the eve of International Women's Day, a host of prominent figures urged leaders to improve girls' and women's access to education, justice and technology and help them fight HIV and malnutrition.

They said it was "an outrage" that girls make up three-quarters of all new HIV infections among adolescents in Africa and that 40 percent of women on the continent suffer from anaemia which results in a fifth of maternal deaths.

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"Nowhere on earth do women have as many opportunities as men," the letter added.

"While the debate around this truth rages everywhere, girls and women living in extreme poverty - those often hit hardest by the injustice of gender inequality - have been left out of the conversation. This must change. The fight for gender equity is global."

Other signatories included boxer Muhammad Ali, actors Robert Redford and Colin Farrell, actresses Charlize Theron and Patricia Arquette, Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg and U2 singer Bono, co-founder of anti-poverty charity ONE which published the letter.

"DEATH SENTENCE"

ONE said being born a girl in a poor country amounted to a "double whammy".

"In too many countries being born poor and female means a life sentence of inequality, oppression and poverty - and in too many cases also a death sentence," it said in a report entitled Poverty is Sexist.

In Niger a woman has a one in 20 chance in her lifetime of dying while giving birth.

In an index compiled by ONE of the 20 hardest countries to be a girl, Niger is followed by Somalia, Mali, Central African Republic, Yemen, Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Ivory Coast, Chad and Comoros.

Globally, half a billion women cannot read, 62 million girls are denied an education and 155 countries still have laws that discriminate against women.

But ONE said investments targeted towards girls and women paid dividends by lifting everyone out of poverty more quickly.

It said 2016 presented two big opportunities for leaders to turn into action the commitments they made on gender inequality when they adopted the new U.N. Sustainable Development Goals last year.

These are the Nutrition for Growth Summit hosted by Rio in August and the replenishment of the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, which is aiming to raise $13 billion.

ONE policy director Eloise Todd said investing in nutrition and health was vital not just for women and girls but for the fight against extreme poverty.

"Until leaders tackle the injustices that pervade the lives of girls and women and invest in fighting poverty, half of the world's resources will remain untapped, and social and economic progress for everyone will be constrained," she added.

(Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, which covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org to see more stories.)

Africa: Women Are Central to Africa's Energy Transformation

By 

Fiona Lamb and Marion Davis, 

Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI).

Sub-Saharan Africa is changing rapidly. New infrastructure, economic development and urbanisation are transforming society. Poverty is declining and the middle class is growing.

Yet two-thirds of the population - more than 600 million people - still lack access to electricity, and more than 700 million cook with traditional biomass: wood, charcoal, dung and agricultural residues.

With population growth, the number of traditional biomass users is expected to rise to 880 

million by 2020, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

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How is this possible? To some extent, it reflects a broader struggle to meet Africa's energy needs. As of 2013, the total power capacity installed in Africa was 147 GW - about the same as in Belgium, or what China installs every year or two, according to the African Development Bank (AfDB).

But governments have also prioritised energy for mining, industry and other large-scale investments. Thus, even with massive electrification efforts under way, the AfDB still expects half the population of sub-Saharan Africa to lack electricity in 2030. And although many countries have promoted clean cookstoves and off-grid household energy solutions, the scale of these efforts is much more modest.

It is time to recognize that modernizing household energy is central to Africa's development - and that means bringing women to the table.

Women and girls collect most of the firewood, spending an average of 2.1 hours per day on the task. They also do most of the cooking - a task that consumes about 1.6 hours per day, according to World Bank estimates. This is time that could be spent on education and income-earning activities, costing sub-Saharan African economies as much as US$29.6 billion per year, the World Bank estimates. Combined with health, environmental and other economic impacts, the cost is close to US$60 billion.

Electricity access can be thus be transformative for women. A study in South Africa, for example, found that rural electrification led to a 9 percentage-point increase in female employment. Another analysis, covering multiple countries, found the larger the share of the population that has access to electricity, the higher the level of gender equality, even in very poor countries.

The reality, of course, is that electricity will not reach all households in the immediate future - not to mention, power is so unreliable in much of sub-Saharan Africa, and so expensive, that a large share of urban households cook with charcoal, just a step above firewood (our recent study of Migori County, Kenya, found 84% of urban households cooked with charcoal).

Still, there is huge scope for improving the quality of energy sources and services available to African households, here and now. In several countries, improved biomass cookstoves are already widely available, for example, and new, higher-tech options and clean fuels are coming on the market. There are also off-grid lighting and small-scale power supply options.

Women are not only the end-users of these technologies - they are also key players in the success of any enterprise that develops and markets them. Women are best positioned to tell designers what they want and need, so the resulting products are desirable to consumers, and seen as worth the cost. Women's groups, which are already active in communities across sub-Saharan Africa, can lead educational efforts and microfinance schemes.

Women can also become household energy entrepreneurs themselves, producing or selling improved stoves, marketing solar lights, and/or providing after-sales services for these products. Close to their customers, women entrepreneurs have the potential to lower customer acquisition and servicing costs and drive these new decentralized solutions.

WOMEN POWER

Women-led renewable energy businesses have a strong track record in accelerating off-grid energy access.

For example, Solar Sister, which combines clean energy technology with a deliberately women-centred direct sales network to deliver improved lighting and cooking options to women in rural Africa, has grown from two to 1,250 entrepreneurs in five years. The company has so far created employment opportunities for 2,000 women across Uganda, Tanzania and Nigeria, and has delivered clean, energy efficient products that benefit 300,000 people in the region.

Another notable success story is that of the Energising Development (EnDev) Kenya programme, run by GIZ. Women make, install and market the stoves. As of June 2015, more than 1.45 million stoves had been installed in different parts of Kenya, serving over 7 million people.

As part of its broader women's empowerment programme, UN Women has designed WomenPower, an integrated cloud-based platform that links women entrepreneurs with information, debt and equity finance, quality-assured goods and service suppliers, customers, leads, and markets. The platform will address the data gap by collecting first-of-its-kind gender-disaggregated data on energy access and entrepreneurship.

Women make enormous contributions to the economies of sub-Saharan Africa: in businesses, on farms, as entrepreneurs or employees, and through unpaid care work at home. Recognizing women's central role in transforming energy systems will bring huge economic and social benefits, directly contributing to gender equality, poverty eradication and inclusive economic growth.

The timing is auspicious. Many clean household energy businesses are already operating in sub-Saharan Africa, and their numbers are growing as entrepreneurs recognize a significant economic opportunity.

The current global focus on enhancing access to modern energy services across Africa presents a unique opportunity for re-evaluating how energy access programmes are designed and delivered and placing women as energy users and providers at the centre of all future efforts.

Fiona Lambe is a research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and Marion Davis is a senior communications officer at the SEI.