Women: Developing Countries

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 27th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I begin by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Loomba, on securing this debate. It is important to bear in mind, when we talk about developing societies and developed societies, that the picture is quite complex. It is never the case that developed societies have been able to achieve equality for women or that the women’s status in all areas is necessarily better. After all, it is striking that, for example, the first woman Prime Minister was in a developing country and not in ours; and that at one time India had far more women ambassadors than we had.

It is also very striking that, if you look at religion, in many developing societies the tribal religions based on fertility cults tend to be far more sympathetic to women than many of the organised religions in developed countries. It is also very striking that when Christianity and other great religions travelled to developing countries, they were suitably interpreted so as to support the position of women. I say this simply to make it clear that not all developing societies are necessarily places where women are always in an inferior position; nor are developed countries necessarily free from the problems that women face.

Having said that just as a point of clarification and qualification, I move on to developing countries, because they are the main subject of our debate. The question is: what are the major challenges that women face in those countries? I want to highlight five. The first challenge is the question of personal insecurity. In developing countries, women generally tend not to enjoy the same degree of physical security, at home or outside, as do men. Rape and sexual harassment are fairly common, and this tends to be particularly acute during situations of civil war. For example, in the Bosnian war, between 20,000 and 50,000 women were raped, and some 400,000 women were raped during the Rwandan genocide of 1994. It is not just a question of rape and the brutality; violence and humiliation also go with it. Rape also becomes a political weapon, forcing women indoors, making sure that they do not come out into the street or the public square and making them suffer from acute isolation and depression.

The second challenge has to do with education. In many developing societies, the literacy rate among women is rather poor. Among men, it generally tends to be around 60%; for women it tends to be between 30% and 45%. Although it is widely realised that better education for women generally means faster economic development, less sexual violence, later marriages, fewer children and better health, education for women is by and large neglected in many developing countries. In order to deal with this situation, sometimes female education is made compulsory—and rightly so—and this is imposed by law. However, some countries have tried an experiment that has been extremely successful and is worth thinking about: cash transfer, conditional on school attendance. This has been tried very successfully in Mexico, Turkey and Pakistan, and has delivered very good results.

The third challenge facing women in developing societies has to do with the economy. A large number of them are not allowed to go out to work or, when they do, they are subject to discrimination, and promotion prospects for many of them are inevitably limited. Very few of them engage in independent business. It is striking, for example, that, in developing countries as a whole, only between 2% and 4% of the women are in independent business and function as employers. Furthermore, they have no control over household resources, although it is generally known that, when women do have control over household resources, they tend to spend the money much more sensibly than men, especially on the health and education of their children.

The fourth challenge has to do with their lack of power, not just in politics, with the qualification that I mentioned earlier. Women are not very widely represented in Parliament or in positions of power. It is also very striking that in many of the senior positions in civil society and elsewhere female representation tends to be rather poor. One way to deal with that has been to guarantee not so much a quota system but some kind of positive action, to ensure that a certain percentage of positions are filled by women. It is such positive action that partly explains why Rwanda, for example, a country where one would not have expected an excellent record, has more female MPs than we have. Sweden also has a better record in women’s representation than some other countries because it has followed a policy of positive action.

The fifth challenge goes much deeper. It is not institutional, and it has to do with the prevalence and domination of patriarchal culture. Women are treated as inferior. They are sexualised and largely treated as objects of sexual gratification, and are sometimes expected to meet impossible standards of beauty and therefore suffer from all kinds of physical ill health. They lack autonomy and control over their lives, which very often results in forced marriages. Female foeticide tends to be quite common, which partly creates a certain amount of stigma associated with the female gender. All this results in poor ambition in women, living not their lives but somebody else’s and modelling themselves, not according to their norms but on somebody else’s. It is important to bear in mind that in all developing societies there is an important sociological tension, which aggravates the situation in the short term, although it improves it in the long run. The tension is that there is a still residual patriarchal culture—even more than residual—but at the same time there is a greater awareness of rights for women and a greater assertion of equality. What you therefore have is a legacy of patriarchal culture, confronted by women asserting their equality, which men are not ready to accept, with the result that men strike out in whatever ways they can. Therefore, in the transitional period, you see more domestic violence than you did before. You also see more cases of rape, as a kind of punishment for women’s insubordination or getting too big for their boots.

It is not just in developing countries that this happens. Many sociologists have pointed out that this also tends to happen in developed countries, where there is still a patriarchal culture, although much attenuated, and on the other hand there are men who are used to thinking of themselves and of women in a certain way being confronted by women who have a great sense of their own dignity and equality. That confrontation results in men not wanting to give up their power, and therefore results in acts of rape, domestic violence and other situations.

These are some of the challenges that women face in developing countries. If we are content not just to debate but to do something about it, we will have to think not merely in terms of new ideas and policies, but also about perhaps being more generous with the aid that we give to those countries for specific women and children-related projects.