Today is Women's Equality Day in the United States. August 26th is the date that commemorates the passage of the 19th Amendment, the Woman Suffrage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave U.S. women full voting rights in 1920.
Please take this opportunity to take action for women worldwide and call or write your senator to support the long overdue ratification of CEDAW, the "Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women."
The United States remains the only democracy in the world that has not ratified CEDAW.
CEDAW, the "Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women," is a United Nations treaty that ensures equal protection for women and girls including economic development, education, safety and of course our favorite topic, health care. It was adopted by the UN in 1979 and is often described as an international "bill of rights" for women. The treaty has been ratified by 186 countries, but it has NOT been ratified by the US. The US, the only democratic country withholding its support, has been reluctant to sign on aligning itself with a small minority of other non-supporters such as Iran and Sudan.
To date, legislatures in nine states have endorsed U.S. ratification: California, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, and Vermont. The Connecticut State Senate and the House of Representatives in Florida, South Dakota, and Illinois also have endorsed U.S. ratification.
The city of San Francisco has even proceeded to implement CEDAW into its laws and ordinances by conducting a gender analysis in two County departments - Public Works and Juvenile Probation. This multi-stakeholder model is built around increased transparency and rigorous self-assessment in order to provide long-term solutions on how to better improve women’s rights throughout daily operations.
In many countries around the world, CEDAW has already proven to be an effective measure to providing women and girls access to education, health care, legal protection in rape and sexual harassment cases, land rights and financial services.
It is a downright embarrassment that the government of United States has not yet endorsed this treaty to its fullest extent. Not only is it a travesty, but it is a dangerous and negligent oversight for our country to continuously ignore this critical piece of international human rights as we continue to wage two wars where women and children have been the hardest hit victims. Not to mention our silent endorsement of genocide in areas of conflict where we are not present and where war is often raged on the bodies of women and girls.
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn have written a powerful piece on the status of women in the world today in this week’s New York Magazine. It gives readers an insight into the personal battles that so many women in this world still have to face while at the same time offering hope as they continue to struggle for equality. In many parts of the world, striving for equality is literally a matter of survival. There are 100 million LESS women in the world today because of gender inequality.
Amartya Sen, the ebullient Nobel Prize-winning economist, developed a gauge of gender inequality that is a striking reminder of the stakes involved. "More than 100 million women are missing," Sen wrote in a classic essay in 1990 in The New York Review of Books, spurring a new field of research. Sen noted that in normal circumstances, women live longer than men, and so there are more females than males in much of the world. Yet in places where girls have a deeply unequal status, they vanish. China has 107 males for every 100 females in its overall population (and an even greater disproportion among newborns), and India has 108. The implication of the sex ratios, Sen later found, is that about 107 million females are missing from the globe today. Follow-up studies have calculated the number slightly differently, deriving alternative figures for "missing women" of between 60 million and 107 million.
Bush spent 8 years dragging his feet on CEDAW and failed to protect women and girls particularly throughout the Iraq war as millions of women and children were displaced leaving them vulnerable to violence and the sex trade. Even more damaging, he completely missed the opportunity to incorporate women’s equality within his foreign policy. As Kristof and Wudunn point out, it is increasingly evident that women are a viable solution for fighting extremism.
...in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it’s not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos. There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. That’s why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution.
Thanks to President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, this administration has taken a much more proactive approach to the issue than our our previous administration.
Policy makers have gotten the message as well. President Obama has appointed a new White House Council on Women and Girls. Perhaps he was indoctrinated by his mother, who was one of the early adopters of microloans to women when she worked to fight poverty in Indonesia. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is a member of the White House Council, and she has also selected a talented activist, Melanne Verveer, to direct a new State Department Office of Global Women’s Issues. On Capitol Hill, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has put Senator Barbara Boxer in charge of a new subcommittee that deals with women’s issues.
Of course domestically, we could do much more here at home to not only raise the status of women but to protect their rights and provide for their basic level of health care. If any of you caught the recent article in the Nation this week that discusses Why Women Need Health Care Reform, you probably would not be all that surprised to discover, that not only are women often underpaid, but they are more likely to be discriminated against by health insurers. In the case of pregnant women alone,
When looking for real help, many uninsured pregnant women encounter this utterly useless advice: get a policy before conceiving. Yet planning ahead doesn't necessarily solve women's insurance problem. Many women couldn't afford whatever care they find, since companies often charge women more--in one case as much as 140 percent more--for the same health coverage, according to a 2008 study by the National Women's Law Center. And only the lucky have the privilege of paying even these high prices, since companies can simply reject women for anything from having been subject to domestic violence to having had a C-section. Meanwhile, the vast majority of individual plans don't even offer maternity coverage. Only 7 percent of women get insurance through the individual market, yet its unwelcoming practices clearly contribute to the fact that another 18 percent are uninsured.
There is even a name for it, "gender rating." It is disgusting to think that such gender discrimination is the status quo among our already poisonous health insurers.
Healthcare reform shouldn't harm Trig Palin, as Sarah Palin has suggested it might, but it would put a knife through the hearts of the bottom-feeding companies that prey on uninsured, pregnant women. By forbidding real insurers from denying coverage on the grounds of pre-existing conditions, as four of the five proposals now floating around the various Congressional committees would, reform should eliminate pregnant women's desperate search for coverage. Most of those bills would also outlaw the practice of "gender rating," or charging women more for the same policies, though the Senate Finance Committee version would reportedly allow insurers to charge companies with more than fifty employees more for women.
So while many of you are making calls and writing your senators urging them to support the public option, please remind them of two distinct but not completely unrelated issues. That if this administration is serious about combating gender inequality at home and abroad, what is needed is a robust public option plan that will COMPLETELY eliminate the discrimination of women or "gender rating" along with their support to ratify CEDAW.
Not only should the US join the ranks of the advanced countries in the world that have universal health care, but we should join every other democracy in the world that has ratified the international "bill of rights" for women.
Click here for a CEDAW senate update and who to contact on the foreign relations committee on this issue.
More on CEDAW