Essay Topic: Woman In the Pacific are given the same rights and opportunities as men. Discuss
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here have been huge changes for women in terms of employment in the past decades, with women moving into paid employment outside the home in ways that their grandmothers and even their mothers could only dream of. In the US, for the first time, in 2011, women made up slightly more than half the workforce. There are (some) high-profile women chief executives. There is a small but increasing number of female presidents. Women are moving into jobs that used to be done by men. Even those women working in factories or sweatshops have more choice and independence than if they remained at home. But their experience is contradictory, as feminist economist Ruth Pearson points out:
As individual workers they experienced both the liberating or the “empowering” impact of earning a regular wage, and of having increased autonomy over their economic lives; at the same time many were also well aware of the fact that their work was low paid, both in comparison with male workers but also with women workers employed in industrialized countries.
This contradiction is widespread – although more women are working, they are often still worse paid than men, in part-time jobs or in the huge informal employment sector with little protection and few rights. In many places, the increase in women working is simply driven by the necessity of having two wages to make ends meet.
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And at the top of industry and government, the faces remain stubbornly male. In fact, there is some evidence that the numbers of women are actually decreasing. As Sheryl Sandburg, chief operating officer of Facebook, said: “Women are not making it to the top of any profession in the world.”
It is true that progress in terms of gender equality is uneven, but the proponents of the argument that women are taking over the world at work need only look at statistics on employment, equal pay and political representation of men and women to see just how wrong they are.
Gender analyses of labour markets tend to look at women’s participation in paid employment compared with men’s – and not the huge informal sector in which so many women work; selling a handful of tomatoes that they have grown in their gardens, picking cotton or sewing at night long after their children have gone to bed. The number of women owning small and medium-sized businesses is estimated to be between 8 million and 10 million, and although this is still far fewer than that for men owning similar enterprises, numbers are slowly growing. In most countries, the informal sector is far larger than the formal one. For example, in south Asia more than 80% of men and women work in the informal sector, and in sub-Saharan Africa it is 74% of women and 61% of men.
There are also more women in formal paid work today than at any point in history. They now make up about 40% of the global formal labour force, and 43% of the agricultural lab our force, although this varies considerably from country to country. For example, in the Middle East and north Africa in 2010, only 21% of women participated in the formal labour market, compared with 71% in east Asia and the Pacific. Men’s lab our participation rates tend to be more stable, both across countries and in different income groups.
While they cannot be said to be representative, the highest positions are even more elusive for women: only seven of 150 elected heads of state in the world are women, and only 11 of 192 heads of government. The situation is similar at the level of local government: female elected Councillors are under-represented in all regions of the world and women mayors even more so. And many of the women in top positions are already lined up for success. The few women in the Forbes rich list mostly come from rich families or business dynasties such as Walmart or Apple.
In the private sector, women are on most boards of directors of large companies but their number remains low compared to that for men. Furthermore, the “glass ceiling” has hindered women’s access to leadership positions in private companies. This is especially notable in the largest corporations, which remain male dominated. Of the 500 largest corporations in the US, only 23 have a female chief executive officer. That is just 4.6%.
This calculation, and its addition to the costs, was accepted by the Body Shop, although they wanted more justification and more detail on what was actually being paid for. Subsequently, some coffee buyers have also agreed to make a similar addition.
Since this development started, there have been more women than men joining the co-ops as new members, an increase in the numbers of women initiating new projects, and a remarkable 100% payback rate on loans made to women.
These changes have led to an increased sense of self-esteem among the women, who now have greater confidence to speak and participate in the affairs of the cooperatives.