HUMAN DEVELOPMENT IN SOUTH ASIA 2000
THE GENDER QUESTION

Overview

While growing up in South Asia is a perpetual struggle, to be a woman in this region is to be a non-person. Women bear the greatest burden of human deprivation in South Asia. - Mahbub ul Haq

Five years ago, when some 17,000 government delegates and 30,000 civil society representatives met for the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, the situation of South Asian women was one of the bleakest faced by women in any part of the world. That bleak scenario, remarkable in itself, was all the more depressing given that, as the Beijing Conference began in 1995, the Prime Ministers of Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, as well as the President of Sri Lanka, were all women. Indeed, those countries were headed by women who proclaimed their whole-hearted support for gender equality. Pakistan’s then-Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, wrote in UNDP’s 1995 Human Development Report that "the trend we have set in gender equality through emancipation of women is now irreversible." Sri Lankan President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga asserted that, "Women should be empowered to share equal roles with men in holding positions of power, in participating in decision-making processes, in controlling and managing scarce resources and also in sharing the incomes and benefits."

Five years after those optimistic words, however, women in South Asia remain far behind men in enjoying basic human rights, let alone in participating on an equal footing with men in educational institutions, the job market or in government. As this year’s Human Development in South Asia Report - the fourth annual Report by the Mahbub ul-Haq Centre for Human Development - makes clear, women in South Asia may work from dawn to dusk, but their economic contribution is scarcely acknowledged at the national level and their access to health, educational and other facilities lags far behind that of men.

• As a region, South Asia has both the lowest literacy rates and the largest gap between the rates of male and female literacy - 64.1 per cent and 37.2 per cent respectively in 1997. While South Asian women make up about 21 per cent of the world’s female population, 44 per cent of the world’s illiterate women are South Asian.

• Discrimination against South Asian women begins at, or even before, birth. Female foeticide and infanticide, neglect of health, and gender-biased feeding practices combined with heavy work burdens, all are manifestations of son preference and the patriarchal structures which prevail across the region. South Asia has one of the most distorted sex ratios in the world - there are only 940 females for every 1000 males.

• Official statistics in South Asia show women’s economic participation as a mere fraction of that of men. As the majority of South Asian women work in the informal sector and as unpaid family helpers, their work goes unrecognised in national systems of accounting.

• Women’s political representation is very poor in South Asia: only 7 per cent of South Asian parliamentarians are women.

• South Asian women’s real GDP per capita at US$874 is lower than any other region in the world, including Sub-Saharan Africa

The Gender Question that this Report addresses is: why are women so severely disadvantaged and how can specific and structural disadvantages be redressed? The pervasive discriminatory practices which result from and perpetuate the systems of patriarchy are analysed in an effort to answer the question in everyone’s mind: How can a region, so rich in culture and tradition and with women leaders holding the highest political positions, be so cruel in its treatment of the vast majority of women? This is the central question which we try to answer in this Report. The answers lie in the following key notions raised and tackled by the Report:

• Gender discrimination in South Asia is situated within deeply ingrained systems of patriarchy which limit and confine women to subordinate roles.

• Invisibility of women in the economy is a worldwide phenomenon, but in South Asia its impact on women is pernicious.

• The legal system as it is practiced in the region is heavily biased against women and often victimizes rather than protects them.

• Educational indicators of South Asian women, although recording improvement in recent years, are some of the worst in the world, especially at technical and higher levels.

• The vast majority of South Asian women lack even the most rudimentary health facilities, resulting in high maternal and infant mortality rates.

• Discrimination in all of the above areas has resulted in invisibility of women in governance structures and in decision-making bodies.

• Each South Asian country must formulate and implement its own agenda for the equality of women with men. This is a sine qua non for both development and peace in the region.

To implement the agenda for women’s equality, outlined in the Report, it is imperative that strong and dedicated institutional structures be in place at the national as well as global levels. At the national level, the Report advocates for a stronger women’s ministry with authority and human and financial resources as the ministry of finance or foreign affairs. At the global level, the Report asserts that without a strong UN agency for women women’s equality in this century will remain elusive. Women need a powerful advocate at the United Nations to provide leadership to national level bodies to fight for their rights.

The founder of the Human Development Centre, Mahbub ul-Haq, coined a deceptively simple phrase prior to the Beijing Summit in 1995 to sum up the effect that gender-based exclusion would have on the cause of development as a whole: If development is not engendered, it is endangered. Simply put, no society has ever developed - or indeed, can ever develop - unless women are fully part of the process and unless they are at least firmly on their way to achieving an equal footing with men. The fact that South Asia lags so far behind in this area is a worrying sign that it will remain mired in poverty, as the poorest, most illiterate and most malnourished region in the world, as well as the least gender-sensitive. The vast majority of the deprived in South Asia are women and girls, and until policy planners in the region see their empowerment as the key to the region’s development, their unequal status will guarantee the region’s continuing misery.

At the turn of the last century, South Asia was just beginning the battle that eventually freed the region of British colonialism. Now, at the turn of this century, South Asians - men and women alike - must break the shackles of gender inequality and free themselves from centuries of patriarchy. Otherwise, the years ahead will be just as desolate for millions upon millions of South Asians as those that followed the end of colonialism, with true freedom and prosperity still out of reach.

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