Women In The World

It’s not enough to have International Women’s Day, it’s necessary to remember why it’s needed, and do so sufficiently frequently so that it might allow us to make a difference. Here are a few statistics that may direct our attention and efforts:

  • At minimum 200 million women and girls have undergone female genital mutilation
  • More than 130 million women and girls did not attend school in 2016
  • 750 million women and girls alive today were married before the age of 18
  • 5000 women and girls globally were murdered for having “dishonored” their families
  • 50% of people with HIV today are women
  • 23.7%  is the portion of women representatives in national parliaments worldwide
  • 2.7 billion women are legally restricted from having the same jobs as men
  • Women have never been Secretary General of the UN, Archbishop of Canterbury, Catholic priests, Prime Minister of Belgium, the Netherlands or Spain, governor of the Bank of England and of course President of the United States

Economic Dignity

The definition of economic dignity has three parts, to be able to take care of your family, having the ability to reach your potential and being free from domination and humiliation. It’s from an article by economist Gene Sperling in the journal Democracy. Sperling worked with both presidents Clinton and Obama. He believes that economic dignity should drive economic policy and that metrics like GDP can be misleading and not produce the right results. In other words economic policy need to make sure for example that people can have jobs with living wages or that corporations not contribute to decreasing upward mobility. Here is how he ends his article: “Government cannot guarantee happiness. But there is little question that with wise and just policy, we do have the power to say to all our people that if you do your part, you care for your family, pursue potential and purpose without ever feeling that you have been given up on, and participate in our economy with a degree of fairness and respect as opposed to domination and humiliation. That much—that basic promise of economic dignity for all—is something that is within our grasp.”

If economic equality means anything to us, then economic dignity is a concept both powerful and useful. And as we begin to ponder national elections, gauging candidates by how closely their rhetoric to combat inequality mirrors this concept may be essential.

The Children of Sex Tourists

The story in The Guardian kept recurring in my thoughts until I finally decided to write about it. The article was about the children of sex tourists in  Pueblo de los Angeles, one of Manila’s poorest neighborhoods, and what made it haunting was that it is duplicated in the slums of many cities, in Asia and the US and surely other continents. Of the 4.7 million tourists in the Philippines each year, 1.2 million are men traveling alone and it has been estimated that probably 40% of them are sex tourists. They have web sites and their own social networks where they call themselves “mongers” for whore-mongers and share tips and other information including what they call GFE, girl friend experience. Maybe 40 to 50% of the girls working in Angeles City had at least their first child from “mongers” whether they were from Europe, America or Australia. These children have no fathers and consequently no financial support from them. They often live in dire poverty, where the mother perhaps a third generation sex worker, may live on the equivalent of $3 a day. They may not have enough to eat, live in hovels with leaky tin roofs where the floor turns to mud when it rains. It can be difficult for them to go to school. The article mentioned one child who was too weak from hunger to walk to school.

If these men are that oblivious to the consequences of their self-gratification they would hardly make good fathers. But if they have the means to travel to the Philippines or elsewhere, they should have the means to help support their progeny. Tourism is embedded in the economy of many nations so it is doubtful sex tourism would be banned by the respective governments. Still it can be addressed, perhaps something like  a general tourist tax or a  tariff to create a fund for those children. Any way to address this problem is very much in order and quite possible.

Resolutions Beyond Ourselves

Every January we make resolutions. It’s a ritual usually focused on ourselves, our health, how to better our lives. And usually those very resolutions require more effort than we may be willing to exert and so we let them slowly or not so slowly fade into the realm of what could have been. I wonder if we would be more willing to sustain the needed effort if the cause was something we believed in, a cause outside ourselves, something where we could contribute and where the very fact of our contribution would make the needed difference.  Here are examples. Please add yours and let us all work toward a cause–or causes to make this world a bit better.

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