... and ain't i a woman?

During the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, attention has been focused on, among other issues, persisting economic inequalities between women and men. They seem incongruous to some, given the improvements that have been made to women's lives in the last 10 years.
Female life expectancy is up worldwide, more girls are going to school, more women are working, and new laws exist to protect women's rights. But at the same time, the gap between women North and South is increasing and the problems are far from being overcome.
Half a million women die each year as a consequence of pregnancy and childbirth; 99% of these deaths occur in developing countries. In the US, a woman is beaten every 18 minutes. As many as 100 million women are "missing" in developing countries due to the infanticide of baby girls and the nutritional neglect of girl children. Ninety million girls still have no education at all.
Debate has raged within feminism for decades over the best way to win equality for women, but the fact remains that piecemeal reform, although important to alleviate suffering in the short term and to spur the movement on to demanding more, is insufficient to eradicate discrimination against and the oppression of women.
Despite the gains made — which overwhelmingly benefit women in industrialised countries — the situation for women worldwide is still disastrous, as evidenced by the statistics quoted above.
The reasons for this lie in more than an unwillingness on the part of individual governments to implement gradual reforms. The causes of the oppression of women on this scale are systemic; they are fundamentally related to the way in which our society is constructed and operates.
It is not a coincidence that gains for women have not gone far enough while the dominant economic system worldwide remains one geared towards the maintenance of profit at all costs.
It is not a coincidence, because this system which relies on the maintenance of profits does so by maintaining inequalities and divisions between people. One of the most fundamental of these inequalities is that based on sex. The exploitation of women's unpaid and underpaid work contributes directly to the maintenance of this profit-based, inhumane system called capitalism.
In the longer term, more than equal pay legislation will be needed. In the longer term, we must challenge the system which maintains the exploitation of women — and the environment, and the majority of ordinary working people.
Otherwise we run the risk that in another 10 years, not only will there be no new gains made for women, but we may even have gone backwards.
By Kath Gelber