Showing posts from category gender.
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Is the White Ribbon the New Black? Making Maternal Health Fashionable
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Celebrity philanthropists such as Bono, Angelina Jolie, and George Clooney have shined their star power on global issues like AIDS, genocide, and refugees. In last month’s Vogue, supermodel Christy Turlington turned the light on one of the most overlooked problems: maternal mortality.
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Half the Sky, All the Promise: The Personal is Political in NYT Special Issue
›“The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution,” write Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn in the lead article of this Sunday’s The New York Times Magazine.
In this special issue devoted to “Saving the World’s Women,” five articles document global failures and personal horrors, but also offer forward-looking solutions from the individual to the institutional. As the subtitle says—“changing the lives of women and girls in the developing world can change everything”— this vital effort can help us not only improve the lives of women, but meet larger goals including international security, global health, and economic development.
In “The Women’s Crusade,” Pulitzer Prize-winners Kristof and WuDunn, whose new book Half the Sky will be published on September 8, outline the ways in which the world’s women and girls are abused, neglected, and overlooked. They use devastating data to detail how women around the world suffer from lack of education, maternal mortality, sexual violence, trafficking, and economic and political oppression, and then bring these figures to life with women’s personal stories.
They argue that elevating women is not a “soft” issue, but rather has the power to transform economies and address security threats—a point echoed in an interview with Hillary Clinton, in which she calls women and girls “a core factor in our foreign policy.”
“I happen to believe that the transformation of women’s roles is the last great impediment to universal progress,” says Clinton, long an informed and passionate advocate for global women’s issues. She encouraged President Obama to create a new ambassadorship for global women’s issues, and filled the opening with Melanne Verveer, a respected activist and former head of the Vital Voices Global Partnership.
Clinton most strongly emphasizes the connection between women’s issues and national security, calling it “an absolute link”: “If you look at where we are fighting terrorism, there is a connection to groups that are making a stand against modernity, and that is most evident in their treatment of women.” She goes so far as to agree that spending taxpayer money on education and healthcare for girls and women in Pakistan would be more effective than military aid to the country.
“A woman who is safe enough in her own life to invest in her children and see them go to school is not going to have as many children. The resource battles over water and land will be diminished,” she says. “And it’s an issue of how we take hard power and soft power, so called, and use it to advance not just American ends but, in advancing global progress, we are making the world safer for our own children.”
Also in the magazine:
The New York Times’ website adds a slide show of Katy Grannan’s portraits of women in South Asia and Africa, and launches a contest soliciting personal stories from the field. Submit your photos and blog posts to Kristof’s blog by September 19.- Dexter Filkins investigates the acid attacks on girl students in Afghanistan in the horrifyingly vivid storytelling he displayed in his best-seller, The Forever War.
- Lisa Belkin takes note of an emerging generation of female philanthropists using their money to “deliberately and systematically to aid women in need,” spurred by the Hunt sisters’ “Women Moving Millions” campaign.
- Tina Rosenberg describes how sex-selective abortion and inadequate health care for young girls has led to a “daughter deficit” in China and India, where, somewhat paradoxically, “development can worsen, not improve, traditional discrimination.”
- Africa’s first female President, Liberia’s Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, tells NYT that if women ran the world, it would be “better, safer and more productive.”
To me, such vital voices are the most powerful, proving that the personal is political. The quotes in the lead article from academic studies, local NGO personnel, and women themselves map the way forward:- “When women command greater power, child health and nutrition improves” – Esther Duflo of MIT, on micro-finance.
- “Girls are just as good as boys” – An unidentified man who once beat his wife for not having sons, but changed his mind when a micro-loan turned her into the family breadwinner.
- “Gender inequality hurts economic growth” – Goldman Sachs, Global Economics Paper, 2008
- “I can’t talk about my children’s education when I’m not educated myself … If I educate myself, then I can educate my children” – Terarai Trent, a Zimbabwean woman now completing a PhD in the United States.
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How Family Planning Meets Development Goals
›“Knowing is not enough; you must act and let your government know that family planning is a right and saves lives,” said Maurice Middleberg of the Global Health Council at a recent event in Chapel Hill.
The other panelists at “How Can Family Planning Efforts Help Us Achieve the Millennium Development Goals?” (Dr. Martha Carlough of UNC, Dr. Ward Cates of Family Health International, and Pape Gaye of IntraHealth International) all provided compelling statistics demonstrating the effectiveness of family planning as an intervention that addresses the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
MDGs 4, 5, and 6 – reducing child mortality; improving maternal health; and combating HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases, respectively – all have obvious connections to health and woman’s reproductive health. An unmet need for family planning, which is measured as the percentage of women of reproductive age who desire to space or limit their births but are not using contraception, can undermine the achievement of these goals.
For example, very early motherhood not only increases the risk of dying in childbirth, it also jeopardizes the well-being of surviving mothers—and their children, too. A child born to an adolescent mother has a greater risk of dying in infancy or childhood.
“Contraception is the best-kept secret in HIV prevention,” said Dr. Cates, who cited research that found that “current contraceptive use in sub-Saharan Africa prevents an estimated 577,200 unplanned births to HIV-infected mothers” and thus prevents the birth of an estimated 173,000 HIV-infected infants each year.
Family planning can help meet the other MDGs, including ending poverty and hunger (Goal 1); providing universal primary education (Goal 2); and promoting gender equity (Goal 3). Young mothers frequently miss out on education and socio-economic opportunities. Being able to make their own decisions about family planning and reproductive health can empower women and improve gender equity. When women are given equal opportunities for education, health, and employment, they are more likely to invest in the education and care of their children. This helps them break the cycle of poverty, hunger, and disease.
Although the MDGS don’t include any formal targets for sexual and reproductive health, the UN Millennium Project has stated that the MDGs cannot be achieved in low-income countries without access to sexual and reproductive health services, including family planning. The panelists agreed that family planning is a cost-effective intervention that provides broader positive benefits for development.
But the real strength of their presentations lay in the personal stories behind the statistics. Middleberg closed the discussion with a story about a woman in Latin America who told him that she loves her husband but was afraid of him every time he touched her. Now, after having undergone sterilization, she no longer worries and can love her husband with no fear of becoming pregnant.
A mother of six interviewed in a 2009 news article about the Philippines’ new family planning bill said, “How can one keep on having children? We don’t earn enough to feed them, much less send them to school.” New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof interviews a Haitian woman with 10 children in a dramatic video interview, “Saving Lives with Family Planning.”
Underlying all of these facts and stories is the belief that one’s health and well-being, including access to family planning, is a right. But as Middleberg said, believing is not enough.
EngenderHealth, an international reproductive health organization working to improve the quality of health care in the world’s poorest communities, is asking Americans to create a video explaining why we should care about international family planning. Contribute your thoughts on YouTube’s Video Volunteers project.
Lisa Basalla, MPH, is a research associate with the Carolina Population Center. She graduated from Case Western Reserve University with a MPH focusing on reproductive and adolescent health. She has worked with Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Communications Programs on its reproductive health knowledge management project as well as a HIV-prevention behavior change communication project in Malawi.
Photo: A billboard promoting family planning in Phnom Pehn, Cambodia. Courtesy flickr user olerousing. -
Women’s Rights: A Silver Bullet for Development?
›May 21, 2009 // By Rachel WeisshaarAny veteran of the international development field will be familiar with the disclaimer that no single intervention, no matter how effective, is a “silver bullet.” But in The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World, journalist Michelle Goldberg argues forcefully that there is one change that is key to solving environmental degradation, food insecurity, water scarcity, global health challenges, skewed gender ratios, poverty, and both under- and overpopulation: women’s empowerment.
Malthusian Anxieties
As Matthew Connelly documents in his book Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, the family-planning movement sometimes lapsed into questionable moral territory during its early years, when women’s rights were not among its chief motivations. Fortunately, it turns out that family planning is actually more successful when motivated by a larger desire to empower women than when spurred by fears of overpopulation (The Means of Reproduction, pp. 74-76; 84-85). Educated women are more likely to delay marriage, have fewer children, obtain good maternal care, and be less vulnerable to HIV/AIDS, write Caren Grown et al. in a literature review of gender equality and women’s health in The Lancet.
A Birth Dearth—or an Empowerment Dearth?
As Goldberg points out, empowering women is also the solution to slowing the rapid population decline being experienced in many European countries and some wealthy Asian ones. “In contemporary developed societies, birthrates are highest where support for working mothers is greatest, a fact conservatives simply ignore in their doomsday surveys of future European decrepitude,” says Goldberg (p. 204).
Thus, comparatively religious, socially conservative European countries like Italy and Poland have some of the lowest fertility rates on the continent (both 1.3 children per woman), while more secular countries like France and Sweden, with their generous paid parental leave policies, public day care, and after-school programs, have some of the highest (2.0 and 1.9, respectively).
Strong Women, Healthy Families
Women’s empowerment is key to human health. The more education a woman has, the healthier her children are likely to be, explains Goldberg (p. 75). In addition, as Grown et al. point out, “in societies such as Bangladesh, where husbands control most household resources, when women did own assets, household expenditure on children’s clothing and education was higher and the rate of illness among girls was reduced.”
But the connection between empowerment and health also works in the other direction: In sub-Saharan Africa, women constitute 57 percent of people living with HIV/AIDS—a direct result of women’s sexual, social, political, and economic subordination (pp. 224-225). Women often do not have the standing to refuse sex, or to demand that a man wear a condom. They also frequently lack the financial and educational resources needed to leave violent or unfaithful husbands (p. 225).
Bare Branches: Sex Ratios and Security
A preference for sons persists in many parts of the world—especially Asia—and the spread of ultrasound, which can detect the sex of a four-month-old fetus, has made sex-selective abortion hugely popular for couples seeking to have a son. But the growing imbalance between men and women has potentially grave security implications for countries such as China and India, warns Goldberg. As Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer point out, Indian states “with high sex ratios, such as Uttar Pradesh, have much higher violent crime rates than states with more normal sex ratios, such as Kerala.”
As Goldberg puts it, “as long as women lack an identity without a husband or a son, sex-selective abortion will continue to deform India’s—and Asia’s—demographics” (p.194). She isn’t hopeful about quick progress: “Like any democracy, India will probably find it easier to slouch toward disaster than to infuriate the defenders of patriarchy. Ultimately, though, unless the country finds a way to break through the encrustations of centuries of misogyny, its democracy itself could be in danger from an unmanageable excess of men” (p. 198).
Toward Nine Billion Hot, Hungry, Thirsty People
Goldberg’s take on the links among population, the environment, and security is admirably nuanced—although I would have appreciated a more extensive discussion of demographic security and population-environment links. She acknowledges that the food riots of 2008, combined with growing concern about water scarcity and climate change, may have generated more attention for family planning and reproductive health.
But she reminds us that the main population-related response to these problems—a commitment to decrease fertility in the developing world—misinterprets the causes. The food shortages were largely the result of growing consumption by middle-income people, combined with continued high consumption in the rich world. Climate change will undoubtedly become much worse if all people in the developing world start to live the high-carbon lifestyles we do in the West, but to date, climate change has been caused almost entirely by industrialized countries.
The Micro and the Macro
Goldberg’s storytelling skills are superb, making The Means of Reproduction both an exciting and enlightening read. She illustrates her broader arguments about women’s rights with compelling stories about individual women and men. She demands that we respect these people’s experiences while arguing powerfully against succumbing to the temptations of political correctness and relativism:
“In thinking about the situation of women in vastly different contexts, there are a number of dangers. One is assuming that Western ways are self-evidently superior and that all women would choose them, if only they could. But another is assuming that women in other cultures are so different from us that situations we would find intolerable—bearing child after child into grinding poverty; being utterly at the mercy of fathers, husbands, and brothers; having one’s clitoris sliced off with a razor—do not also cause them great pain” (p. 9).
Goldberg has pulled off an impressive feat: The Means of Reproduction is accessible enough to serve as an introduction to the debates around population and family planning, but complex enough to inform readers about the latest controversies and battlegrounds in the field. Goldberg does have an opinion, but it’s based on reams of research. Here’s hoping The Means of Reproduction finds a place in the canon.
Photo: Women and children at the health post at Sam Ouandja refugee camp in the Central African Republic. Courtesy of Pierre Holtz/UNICEF and Flickr user hdptcar. -
Pakistan’s Daunting—and Deteriorating—Demographic Challenge
›Every day it seems the headlines bring new worries about the future of Pakistan. But among the many challenges confronting the nation—including a growing Taliban insurgency—one significant problem remains largely undiscussed: its rapidly expanding population.
Consider this: Pakistan’s population nearly quadrupled from 50 million in 1960 to 180 million today. It’s expected to add another 66 million people—nearly the entire population of Iran—in the next 15 years. UN projections predict that by the late 2030s, Pakistan will become the fourth most populous country in the world, behind India, China, and the United States.
And believe it or not, the demographic outlook for Pakistan got bleaker in recent weeks. The new medium-range UN projections for Pakistan’s total population have been raised to 335 million for 2050—45 million higher than the UN projection just two years ago. Why the change? Because birth rates aren’t falling as had been predicted—women in Pakistan have an average of four children—and unmet need for family planning remains high.
The case of education provides a snapshot of how these demographics affect Pakistan, from basic quality-of-life issues to the country’s overall stability. Even though the official literacy rate in Pakistan has increased from about 18 percent to 50 percent since 1970, the number of illiterate people has simultaneously jumped from 28 million to 48 million. The literacy rate for women stands at a shockingly low 35 percent.
As public schools have become increasingly overcrowded, more parents have turned to madrasas in an attempt to educate their children—or at least their sons. It’s no secret that some of Pakistan’s madrasas have ties to radical religious and terrorist-affiliated organizations.
So what does this portend for the future?
Even assuming large infusions of assistance from the United States, Pakistan’s public school system will become even more overwhelmed in the years ahead. Building enough schools and hiring enough teachers would be daunting in any country, let alone one facing as many challenges as Pakistan. It seems likely that enrollments in madrasas will swell, and more children will face a future with no schooling whatsoever. Clearly, this is not a recipe for a more stable and peaceful Pakistan.
Pakistan’s rapid population growth is not inevitable, however. A key driver is lack of access to family planning, which is symptomatic of the overall poor status of women and girls. More than 25 percent of Pakistani women have an unmet need for family planning—meaning the demand is clearly there—and nothing in the Koran prohibits its usage. In other majority-Muslim nations, such as Algeria, Bangladesh, and Iran, family planning has been prioritized and is widely used.
Unfortunately, family planning programs in Pakistan and many developing countries have suffered from both inattention and funding cuts in recent years. Traditionally, the United States has been a major source of funding and technical assistance, but since 1995, U.S. international family planning assistance has fallen 35 percent (adjusted for inflation), even as demand has increased.
Today, more than 200 million women—many of them in the most impoverished parts of the world—have an unmet need for family planning. In countries like Pakistan, the resulting rapid population growth makes it increasingly difficult to provide sufficient education, health care, housing, and employment—and depletes land, water, fisheries, and other vital natural resources.
The Obama administration recently proposed a new U.S. assistance strategy for Pakistan—and a key component is a significant increase in development and economic assistance. Let’s hope it will include an increase for family planning. It would be a wise investment in a brighter, more stable future—for Pakistan and for the world.
Tod Preston is vice president for U.S. government relations at Population Action International.
Photo: Children in Jinnah Colony, Karachi, Pakistan. Courtesy of Flickr user NB77. -
Video: Malcolm Potts on ‘Sex and War’
›March 6, 2009 // By Wilson Center Staff“What is the thing that may make the world as peaceful as possible?” asks Malcolm Potts in this video from the Environment Change and Security Program. “I think it’s very important to give women as much autonomy in society as we possibly can; to fight as hard as possible for women’s equality. Because these behaviors that created warriors never benefited women.”
In this short expert analysis, Malcolm Potts, Bixby Professor of Population and Family Planning at the University of California Berkeley, discusses his latest book, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World. To learn more, please see a full summary and complete video of Malcom Potts speaking recently about his book at a February 11, 2009, Wilson Center event.
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Testosterone: The Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction?
›March 1, 2009 // By Will Rogers“The ultimate weapon of mass destruction—and perhaps of economic destruction—is the testosterone molecule,” quipped Malcolm Potts at the February 11, 2009, discussion of his new book, “Sex and War: How Biology Explains War and Offers a Path to Peace,” which explores the pivotal question, “Why do human beings systematically and deliberately kill our own species?” Potts, the Bixby Professor of Population and Family Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, was joined Science magazine’s Ann Gibbons, a leading correspondent on human evolution, who examined whether aggressive human behaviors are evolving in response to changing social structures.
Testosterone: Risky Business
“In 1987, some anthropologists and sociologists made a statement at UNESCO that it is scientifically incorrect to say we’ve inherited a tendency to make war from our animal ancestors,” said Potts. “I think that that is wrong.” Evolutionary psychology suggests that humans have inherited certain predispositions that “help us adapt to find food, select mates, avoid danger, and compete for resources in a hostile world,” said Potts. Men compete for women, so it is logical, from a reproductive standpoint, that men would take more risks than women, he argued.
In addition, “there’s strong evidence that there is a genetic tendency for men in the prime of life to attack and kill their neighbors,” Potts noted, while emphasizing that this does not mean that men are preordained to fight one another. “Such predispositions are extraordinarily flexible,” and respond well to peaceful cultural norms.
The Pill Is Mightier Than the Sword
“Once we recognize our violent origins, then we need to ask not ‘why do wars break out?’ but ‘why does peace break out?’” posed Potts. “Judged on the basis of same-species killing,” the violent 20th century may have been the most peaceful in human history, he claimed.
“In the whole of recorded history, I cannot find a single example of women banding together spontaneously and then going out to attack a neighboring group,” maintained Potts. He argued that increasing women’s individual freedom and collective power in civil society and government is the best way to achieve a more peaceful world. More specifically, slowing population growth and promoting more balanced age structures by giving women access to family planning will contribute not just to their own autonomy, but also to long-term peace, he argued.
Evolving To Become Less Aggressive?
“Humans are capable of incredible acts of kindness but also despicable acts of terror,” said Gibbons. “We murder, slaughter, barbeque, and even eat our own species, and we’ve been doing it for a long time.” But it is difficult to determine whether this propensity for aggression is an ancient trait or has more recently evolved. “There are no other human species alive to show us different models for male aggression…so we have look at fossils, DNA, and our closest relatives—the chimpanzees and gorillas,” Gibbons said.
Human aggression may be continuing to evolve. As Gibbons explained, “researchers, as they look at the human genome project—the HapMap Project—have discovered there are many, many genes that have come under natural selection that have evolved in the last 100,000 years, since modern humans spread out of Africa.” Therefore, as warfare becomes less necessary to our daily survival, our species might evolve to become less aggressive. “Are we seeing, in our sexual selection, mates being chosen that are a little less aggressive?” Gibbons asked. “We are still evolving,” she emphasized. “The story isn’t over yet.”Photos: From top to bottom, Malcolm Potts and Ann Gibbons. Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Woodrow Wilson Center.
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The Biological Roots of Conflict
›Armed conflict and its consequences concern us all. But where does war actually come from? In our new book, Sex and War: How Biology Explains War and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World, Thomas Hayden and I argue that warfare and terrorism are written in our DNA. But that doesn’t mean humanity is doomed to a future as violent as our past has been. Understanding the biological basis of our warring instincts, we argue, gives us our best hope of decreasing the frequency and brutality of warfare.
Biologically speaking, war is an unusual behavior—very few other animals intentionally set out to kill members of their own species. Along with chimpanzees, with which we share a common evolutionary ancestor, we humans have a rare and terrible behavioral predisposition: Our young males, in the prime of life, are prone to band together and attack members of neighboring groups. The conflicts currently underway in the the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Darfur, Iraq, and elsewhere all have many proximate causes—political, religious, environmental, and otherwise. But contrary to long-held beliefs about the cultural roots of war, we argue that the behavior that makes the systematic slaughter of other human beings possible in the first place is based on a suite of evolved behavioral predispositions, which we call “team aggression.”
Anyone who has been in combat will tell you he fought not for a flag, or democracy, or some other abstraction, but for his buddy in the trench, his mate in the torpedo boat, or the soldier next to him in the up-armored Humvee. Intense loyalty for one’s immediate comrades, along with loss of empathy for the members of the enemy, are at the heart of team aggression, and of warfare and terrorism. These predispositions stretch back more than seven million years to our ape ancestors’ early battles for survival. We are all descended, by definition, from the victors of innumerable conflicts over resources, territory, and the right to mate. And we bear the marks of this legacy in the behaviors and impulses that spur us on to lethal conflict to this day, even when other solutions might be available.
The big question then becomes not, “Why do wars break out?”—that is the easy part—but, “Why does peace break out?,” as we know it often does. Far from condemning us to a future of warfare, understanding war’s biological roots can point us toward policies that increase the likelihood of peace, which also has deep roots in our biology. The first step toward peace is to do everything possible to grant women greater decision-making power in society. Team aggression is primarily a male drive, and while women are certainly competitive and capable of fighting bravely and ferociously, in the vast expanse of human history there is not a single record of women banding together spontaneously to attack their neighbors. Our book argues that when women have more agency, their societies become less warlike.
Population size and growth rates are two more key factors in the quest for peace. Rapid population growth increases competition over resources, increases unemployment, and boosts the ratio of young to older men, and all of these factors help facilitate extremism and violence. Experience shows, however, that when women have the opportunity to control their own fertility, family size and population growth decline—demonstrating that accessible, voluntary family planning programs are powerful tools for peace.
There is an aphorism: “If you want peace, understand war.” In Sex and War, we argue that understanding war also means understanding our own biology and evolutionary history. If we can do that, we can find more ways to help the biology of peace win out over the biology of war.
Malcolm Potts is Bixby Professor of Population and Family Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health. For more media coverage of Sex and War, see Newsweek, Wired Science, and The Scientist.
“Knowing is not enough; you must act and let your government know that family planning is a right and saves lives,” said Maurice Middleberg of the Global Health Council at a recent 
Any veteran of the international development field will be familiar with the disclaimer that no single intervention, no matter how effective, is a “silver bullet.” But in 
Every day it seems the headlines bring new worries about the future of Pakistan. But among the many challenges confronting the nation—including a 
“The ultimate weapon of mass destruction—and perhaps of economic destruction—is the testosterone molecule,” quipped Malcolm Potts at the February 11, 2009, discussion of his new book, “
Armed conflict and its consequences concern us all. But where does war actually come from? In our new book, 
