This purpose of this diary is to encourage continued discussion of the topic that was diary'd (and subsequently removed) on Saturday.
I am not going to wade into the plagiarism broo-ha-ha. But there were a lot of kossacks who were engaging in very good conversations about women's rights in that diary's comments section.
So please continue here. I've pasted some excerpts of the Toronto Star Article and added some of my own "insight" and opinions below the fold.
From the Toronto Star, June 6, 2009.
The term "missing women" was coined in 1990, when Indian economist Amartya Sen calculated a shocking figure. In parts of Asia and Africa, he wrote in The New York Review of Books, 100 million women who should be alive are not, because of unequal access to medical care, food and social services. These are excess deaths: women "missing" above and beyond natural mortality rates, compared to their male counterparts.
Women who are dead because their lives were undervalued.
The article continues
From her office at the University of British Columbia, economics professor Siwan Anderson has been crunching numbers to try and understand why so many women are dying. "If you're interested in gender discrimination, it's really one of the starkest measures of discrimination, because it's women who should be alive, but aren't," she says.
The 40-year-old researcher recently co-authored a paper with New York University's Debraj Ray, focusing on figures from China, India and sub-Saharan Africa for the year 2000. What they discovered flew in the face of existing literature and commonly held beliefs about the missing women phenomenon.
"Previously, people had thought that they (the missing women) were all at the very early stages of life, prenatal or just after, so before four years old," Anderson says. "But what we found is that the majority are actually later." Female infanticide has been endemic in India and China for some time, which she says led researchers to assume that it was the source of all the missing women. But the truth is much more complicated.
Near the end of the article is the discussion of dowry killings. Something I had never even heard of. Quite horrific...
Anderson says dowry payments can be six times a family's annual wealth – an excruciating price, especially for poor villagers. The implications of this hefty sum trickle down to the first moments of a child's life. While conducting recent field work in India, Anderson asked villagers about selective abortions and found them open about the fact that they use ultrasound to determine the baby's gender and help them decide whether or not to keep it.
"They see no other options," she says. "They really cannot afford to have a daughter."
Future research will delve deeper, seeking answers to questions such as: How often are men given mosquito nets to protect themselves from malaria, but not women? How many women die because they are not taken to the hospital when they are sick?
Anderson is using data gathered primarily from the World Bank, the United Nations and the World Health Organization, but admits that getting the figures can be a huge challenge. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, many deaths go undocumented, and in India, it is virtually impossible to know how many "unintentional" deaths are actually dowry killings, because they are not accurately reported to the authorities.
When I read about these horrors, I must admit that mixed with my horror was a feeling of being exceedingly fortunate (and more than a little guilty about that) to be an educated woman in this country.
The larger question is what can be done to curb these atrocities?
Obama mentioned women's freedoms in his Cairo speech. I believe that is something that no other US leader has done in a Muslim-majority nation.
As a result, some think that his focus on the rights of women in those nations was a significant step forward and are thrilled he made that step.
However, others have pointed out that he steered clear of mentioning the most egregious treatment of women. And they fault him for not going far enough in his call for gender-equal human rights, or acknowledgment of progress that has been made.
I happened to hear one of these women while listening to the talk show "To the Point" on NPR on Friday. She was Mona Eltahawy who is described on her web site as:
Mona Eltahawy is an award-winning syndicated columnist and an international public speaker on Arab and Muslim issues.
Mona was born on Aug. 1, 1967 in Port Said, Egypt and has lived in the U.K, Saudi Arabia and Israel and is currently based in New York. She is a board member of the Progressive Muslim Union of North America. She calls herself a proud liberal Muslim and comfortably incorporates into her lectures her experience of wearing a headscarf for nine years.
I think she made a compelling case that women should not continue to be repressed or mis-treated in the name of "cultural sensitivity" (I believe she called that moral or cultural relativism).
She also clearly thought that Obama did not go far enough. Here are some of her own words from her column written in response to Obama's Cairo Speech:
Oh how he thrilled my heart by bringing up women's rights but why oh why, head demanded, did he have to keep mentioning headscarves every time he spoke of Muslim women? Didn't he spend a good few minutes speaking out against stereotypes? So why perpetuate one that too many, both Muslims and non-Muslims alike, share of Muslim women?
Yes education, small business loans and political involvement are all important for this Muslim woman's heart and head but I wish Obama had assured the women and girls of Afghanistan that their rights would not be sacrificed for the sake of a ceasefire or truce with the Taliban or other violent extremists.
For months now, Afghan women's rights activists have urged him to do just that and what a victory for those courageous women it would have been if he'd acknowledged them.
So, what do you think?
Clearly there are many nations where horrible treatment of women is completely entrenched and institutionalized. What is the best path to rectifying that huge problem?
Did Obama not go far enough, or did he go too far? Would there have been a backlash if he tried to rhetorically push further than he did?