The male monopoly on leadership is fracturing but advances in some countries are being reversed

Women and power

the global gains and losses
February -

Is a woman in the White House too dizzying a prospect for the US?
Female leaders remain scarce worldwide and it looks as if Clinton may not join their ranks
Anne Perkins
There is a just a shred of comfort for everyone who wanted to see a woman in the White House. Hillary Clintons slide in recent primaries does not seem to have been gender-related. Discussion about what a female presidency would be like was never encouraged and the idea remained an unwritten script: a dizzying prospect. But everybody seems to have been afraid of dizziness until Barack Obama showed that it could inspire. The excitement that Obama generates, compared with the familiarity of Hillary Clinton, and her husband, Bill, has been the most decisive factor to his advantage and her disadvantage. Older women have remained among her most loyal supporters; they have been moved by Clintons pride in the fact that her mother, who was born before women in the US had the vote, has been around to see her campaigning to be president. Clintons successes and failures have been a lesson to aspirant women politicians but that lesson is not that women cannot win. Women are scarce in US politics, with only 16% of seats in Congress. Although more than 90% of voters say they would vote for a woman, barely half believe the US is ready for a woman president. So the Clinton team (which had a strong representation of women, including her recently dismissed campaign manager) chose to project her as one of the boys. The Nobel peace prize winner Betty Williams, who made women a force for peace through the Northern Ireland Peace Movement, criticised her early in the campaign: Id love to see a woman in oce in the United States of America. However, the term woman comes rst . . . I think Hillary has to remove herself from being one of the boys. The serious problem is that the model of female leadership in the West remains Boudicca or Catherine the Great, warrior queen or mother of the nation, although it is beginning to look as if voters want neither. Clinton went into her campaign most concerned about the commander in chief question the accusation that she would not be tough enough to be the leader of the nation. But the Democratic electorate responded to her most over such issues as health. And the most memorable moments in her campaign were the eight seconds in a coee shop when she allowed the world to see why she wanted the job. Clinton could not even have entered the presidential race were there not a global social, economic and political transformation under way. Over the Wests decade-long economic summer, political concerns have converged on the environment, schools and family, which were once regarded as womens territory. And politics is slowly becoming less gendered. But womens progress towards power is patchy. There are just six female prime ministers, plus a few presidents, in all of Europe and Australasia. Worldwide only one in ve elected representatives is female and they have to conform to certain expectations. The failed bid for the French presidency last year by the

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Women and power Woman in the White House too dizzying a prospect?
Continued from page 1 Socialist candidate, Sgolne Royal, was a warning not to go outside the familiar. She made a bold attempt to campaign on a progressive feminist agenda and her failure was seen as womens failure. (Feminists have vainly argued that she and her strategy were awed too blind to ordinary peoples concerns, too lacking in leadership.) Successful women still need to be seen as being as tough as the female political pioneers. The most famous Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, was preceded by Golda Meir (the only man in the Israeli cabinet). Their successors are New Zealands Helen Clark and Germanys Angela Merkel. The majority leader in the US Senate, Nancy Pelosi, is said to be tougher than her predecessor, Tom DeLay. Yet even as those who have succeeded have to satisfy the expectations of commentators, women leaders are discreetly building female power bases, contacts and connections that circumvent the boys world that used to define and protect the male monopoly of power. There is an international women leaders summit (membership limited to heads of government) preparing an initiative on global security. Clare Short, as Britains development secretary, was a member of an informal international club of women in similar posts. On a smaller UK scale, Harriet Harman won the Labour deputy leadership with a campaign that put her in many major town centres, accessible and approachable. There is a danger that in the search for power, women compromise on their most important asset their dierence. There is an appetite for a reinvented politics and a new political elite, which rst became evident in the old Soviet bloc countries. After the Berlin wall fell, nothing needed to be the same again and there could be a new class of politicians: women would be leaders without communist baggage. Now they are into a second generation. There is the extraordinary Yulia Tymoshenko in Ukraine, oligarch turned democratic favourite, prime minister and if she survives in the murky world of politics there president in waiting. A similar search for a dierent way of doing business is behind the small surge of women in Africa, where Mozambique and Liberia have women at the top, and in Latin America, where Chile and Argentina now have women presidents. Paraguay and even Brazil might follow. They are not proxies for their husbands or dynastic shoo-ins. They are women with long years of political grind behind them who have tapped in to a yearning for real change and lasting social reform. Argentinas new Peronist president, Cristina Fernndez de Kirchner, is married to the ex-president, but unlike Clinton she had an independent political career first. She came into politics, as did her Chilean counterpart Michelle Bachelet, to oppose military dictatorship. Both gained strength from electoral reform that introduced quotas for female representation. Both are pioneers of a new political elite. The dierence, made obvious in a break with a dubious past, is a factor in the rise of Merkel, Germanys rst woman chancellor. She came from the old East Germany and had no local party power base. Her tough, adroit handling of colleagues has allowed her

Popular . . . the public likes Helen Clark better than her government Getty to create her own space, where she can act with candour and treat failing colleagues with discreet ruthlessness. Merkel was in the headlines after she berated Russias president, Vladimir Putin, for his disregard of human rights, and oended Chinese sensibilities by entertaining the Dalai Lama. But she does conciliation as well as confrontation, squeezing agreement out of the G8 on carbon emissions and salvaging the European Unions Lisbon treaty. Merkel might be rightwing and uninterested in a feminist agenda, but she has made a virtue of rational, uncharismatic tenacity. She is the antithesis of her flashy Social Democrat rival, Gerhard Schrder, or her predecessor, Helmut Kohl, mired in nancial scandal. Like Thatcher, she is a symbol of the self-condent exercise of power. Her nearest equivalent is New Zealands Clark, a Labour prime minister since 1999. She is to the left of her party even when it veered right eective and, after three consecutive terms, more popular than her government. The Helen Clark is a man jibe has given way to the double-edged shes a good Kiwi bloke. What she has most in common with Merkel is the perception that they are both their own people, not the product of the party machine. Women have won power because they have come to stand for change. Clintons critics claim she was always compromised by being the Democratic insider in the race. It will be interesting if her attempt to reach those unrepresented in mainstream politics is overwhelmed by a man who successfully trades on his dierence.

Angela Merkels role can be seen as feminist, even if her politics are not

Bedouins start to make the long journey to university

Jessica Shepherd
Nur knew that as a bedouin an Arab nomad living in poverty in Israels Negev desert, the likelihood of going to university was remote. For a woman it was almost impossible. So the 18-yearold applied in secret to Ben-Gurion University and was accepted. Nur (a pseudonym) knew that she needed her fathers permission to go and that he had denied it. Only when a lecturer from the university visited her father in their home an encampment with no running water and electricity did he change his mind. Nur became one of the rst women of the 16-centuries-old Negev bedouin to go to university. That was 20 years ago. Today the education of Negev bedouin girls is being dramatically transformed thanks in part to pioneering women like Nur. Back in the 1980s many Negev bedouin girls were taken out of school at the age of 12 to help their mothers at home. By puberty many families who had not already done so removed their daughters from school. Although this University education has given me a lot of power and knowledge Sarab AbuRabia-Queder still goes on, the numbers nishing school and going on to university are now in their hundreds. Records from Adva, an Israeli policy analysis centre, show that there were an estimated 160,000 Negev bedouins in 1987 half of whom were thought to be female but no Negev bedouin woman was at Ben-Gurion University, which is the nearest for them. By 2007 almost 250 bedouin women were on degree or teacher-training courses. The previous year, the rst bedouin woman from the Negev, Rania al-Oqbi, graduated in medicine and the rst of all bedouin woman, Sarab Abu-Rabia-Queder, was awarded a PhD. She is now a visiting fellow at the Centre for Gender Studies at Oxford University and has a book on Negev bedouin womens experiences at university in Israel out this year. Abu-Rabia-Queder predicts that the number of Negev bedouin women at university will more than double by the end of the next decade. She says their embrace of higher education is down to women, like Nur and herself, who pushed the boundaries of what tribal leaders deemed acceptable in the 70s and 80s. Non-governmental organisations and Ben-Gurion University have also played a critical role in encouraging bedouin women to go to university. Nur now teaches people about the bedouin. I feel a university education has given me a lot of power and knowledge about the outside world.

4 The Guardian Weekly 22.02.08

Women and power

Iraqi women count the cost of freedom they have lost

Since the invasion, rapes, burnings and murders have become a daily occurrence
Mark Lattimer
They lie in the Sulaimaniyah hospital morgue in Iraqi Kurdistan, set out on white-tiled slabs. A few have been shot or strangled, some beaten to death, but most have been burned. One girl, a lock of hair falling across her half-closed eyes, could almost be on the point of falling asleep. Burns have stretched the skin on another young womans face into a xed look of surprise. These women are not casualties of battle. The cause of death is generally recorded as accidental, although their bodies often lie unclaimed by their families. It is getting worse, especially the burnings, says Khanim Rahim Latif, the manager of Asuda, an Iraqi organisation based in Kurdistan that works to combat violence against women. Just here in Sulaimaniyah there were 400 cases of the burning of women last year. Lack of electricity means that every house has a plentiful supply of oil, and she accepts that some cases may be accidents. But the nature and scale of the injuries suggest that most were deliberate, she says, handing me the morgue photographs of one young woman after another. Many of the bodies bear the unmistakable signs of having been subjected to intense heat. In many cases the woman is accused of adultery, or of a relationship before she is married, or the marriage is not sanctioned by the family, Khanim says. Her husband, brother or another relative will kill her to restore their honour. If he is poor the man might be arrested; if he is important, he wont be. And in most cases, it is hidden. The body might be dumped miles away. In other cases, disputes over such murders are resolved between families or tribes by the payment of a forfeit, or the gift of another woman. The authorities say such agreements are necessary for social stability, to prevent revenge killings, says Khanim. In March 2004 George Bush said that the advance of freedom in the Middle East has given new rights and new hopes to women . . . the systematic use of rape by Saddams former regime to dishonour families has ended. This may have given some people the impression that the American and British invasion of Iraq had helped to improve the lives of its women. But this is far from the case. Even under Saddam, women in Iraq including in semi-autonomous Kurdistan were widely recognised as among the most liberated in the Middle East. They held important positions in business, education and the public sector and their rights were protected by a statutory family law that was the envy of womens activists in neighbouring countries. But since the 2003 invasion, advances that took 50 years to establish are crumbling away. In much of the country women can only now move around with a male escort. Rape is committed habitually by all the main armed groups, including those linked to the government. Women are being murdered throughout Iraq in unprecedented numbers. In October the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq (Unami) expressed serious concern over the rising incidence of so-called honour crimes in Iraqi Kurdistan, conrming that 255 women had been killed in the rst six months of 2007, three-quarters of them by burning. An earlier Unami report cited 366 burns cases in Dohuk in 2006, up from 289 the year before, although most were not fatal. In Irbil, the emergency management centre had reported 576 burns cases since 2003, resulting in 358 deaths. When questioned, Iraqi doctors have told UN investigators that many of these burnings are self-inflicted. More than half of these women had sustained between 70%-100% burns which, according to doctors, suggested that they were self-inicted, the earlier Unami report said. A UN human rights ocer has relayed to me the words of one judicial investigator in Irbil: The woman is unhappy, or there is domestic abuse, but the family doesnt listen. So she does it because she wants to draw attention to herself. This claim that some of these injuries are self-inicted can be heard from dierent quarters in Iraq. The human rights minister in the Kurdistan regional government, Yousif Aziz, says: [Burnings take] place daily. Some are killed, some burn themselves. Activists, however, say that if the wounds are self-inflicted it is because the women have been forced to do it.

The Iraqi penal code prescribes leniency for those who commit such crimes for honourable motives, enabling some of the men involved to get o with no more than a ne. The Kurdish authorities, Aziz says, have removed these provisions for leniency from the code but the killings continue to mount. The politicians say the situation of women is all right with the new constitution in Iraq and new laws in Kurdistan, says Khanim, but it is deteriorating. Khanims organisation sees cases from across Iraq. She tells me of a man from Kirkuk who accused his sister of adultery. When we asked him why he wanted to kill his sister, he said, Because it is now a democracy in Iraq. He thought that democracy meant he

could do whatever he wanted. But the mans stupidity hid an important point: under the new system of government developing in Iraq, family disputes are increasingly settled not in state courts but by local tribal or religious authorities. In just one month last year, 130 unclaimed womens bodies were counted in the Baghdad morgue, a representative from the Organisation of Womens Freedom in Iraq has told the BBC. Another womens activist tells me why she refuses all media interviews: The work has to be secret. In Kurdistan it is possible, but in Baghdad we couldnt open a shelter for women, we would just be attacked. In a nondescript building on a busy road in the north I visit one of the few

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Changing times . . . clockwise from below left: students at the University of Baghdad in 1976, during Saddams regime; and today; and an Iraqi woman walks past mannequins in a Baghdad clothing store Sipa Press/Rex Features; Hadi Mizban/Getty; Karim Sahib/AFP/Getty the highest in the world. But, as one MP reminds me: Even getting here is dangerous. People watch you come in. In 2005 one female MP, Lamia Abed Khadouri, was shot dead on her doorstep. Although the new constitution has empowered women in parliament, a Baghdad economics professor who survived an assassination attempt last year (and also asked not to be named), fears that what it has to say about the family may have had the opposite effect in the home. A committee reviewing the constitution is due to present its nal amendments to parliament and an alliance of womens organisations has been lobbying for the removal of article 41, under which the old statutory family law will be replaced with a system where marriage, divorce, custody and inheritance will be determined according to the dierent religions and sects in Iraq. Campaigners argue that this would strengthen the control of religious institutions and give constitutional legitimacy to sectarianism. Most of all they fear an explosion in violence against women as traditional tribal codes take hold. But only two of the committees 27 members are women and many of the women MPs represent the more conservative religious parties. Some are escorted everywhere by their husbands. A cabinet minister in Baghdad tells me: The Islamisation had already started under Saddam, but now it is much more pronounced. Many meetings for MPs are now held outside the country. One evening I joined a group of women MPs in Amman who were attending a UN gathering on womens rights. One of them, Samira al-Musawi, a member of Iraqs ruling Shia alliance and chair of the womens committee in the Iraqi parliament, said: We are making progress, because now we are a democracy and we can discuss these issues together. Her faced framed in black, she dismissed the concerns over article 41 and said that only one or two members of her committee wanted it changed. At another table, an Arab Sunni MP in a white headscarf disagreed pointedly over article 41. We want the old law back, we and the Kurds, but the Shia prevent it. You want to know what the situation of women is? How many widows are there now? The coordinator of a womens organisation in Baghdad, who asked not to be named, says some groups target women through kidnapping or sexual assault to make a family weak. A girl was raped and returned to her family but she committed suicide rather than face the shame. Saddam was a dictator but at least then we had the freedom to go out. Then there was only one criminal Saddam but now they are everywhere, you do not know who your persecutor is. Claims of rape being used as a weapon of war to humiliate and terrify communities are now frequently made against all the main parties in the conict, not just Iraqi forces. Since 2003 US forces have denied numerous allegations that soldiers have raped and abused female detainees or held them as bargaining chips in the hunt for family members wanted as insurgents. But the Pentagons Taguba report into abuse at Abu Ghraib prison conrmed that US military police had photographed and videotaped naked women prisoners and referred to a guard having sex with a female detainee. This year four US soldiers were found guilty of the rape and murder of 14-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza and three members of her family in Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad, in an attack the US military had at first blamed on Sunni insurgents. Rapes carried out against Shia or Christian women have been justied by insurgent groups as revenge for what was done to women in Abu Ghraib. The abuse of women has become both the vehicle and the justication for sectarian hatred in Iraq.

secret shelters in Iraq for women eeing violence. A broom-cupboard door is unlocked to reveal a hidden staircase leading to a two-room apartment where the morning sunshine and the hum of trac lter through high-set windows. A pile of thin mattresses show that up to 20 women can stay here at any one time. The most recent arrivals are a woman and her two children from the local area. The woman, Zaynab, says she wants to divorce her abusive husband, a drunk, but he has refused. She had gone to live with her mother but he had come to threaten her. I love my children. My family wanted me to marry again but I dont want to marry anyone, I want to be with my children. Nur is here because she helped someone on impulse. Near her home in Diyala she heard the screams of a man locked in a compound and helped him escape. It turned out he was being tortured by a militia group. Later, the militia found out she had helped the man. My father is dead, I have no brothers, just my mother and my little sister. They cant protect me. She ed north to Kirkuk, where she heard about the shelter. Solaf, the young manager of the shelter, is used to receiving threats herself. (Her name, like those of Nur and Zaynab, has been changed for this article.) With nowhere else for the women to go, she tries to negotiate with their families to see if they can be

reconciled, sometimes threatening to take them to court. Women now know more about human rights, but the men and the culture dont allow it. I ask about the burnings. Sometimes the family burns their daughter or wife, because no one can tell. They say in the hospital it was an accident. Some kill themselves. Solaf can see that I still nd it hard to accept that someone, even under duress, would commit suicide by burning herself alive. You have to realise, she says, that the family just locks the girl into a room until she does it. They may leave her a knife, but it is hard to kill yourself with a knife. In one way, it is easier with re. At the Iraqi parliament in Baghdad, the women MPs le into the chamber beside their male counterparts, smiling, arguing, some in headscarves, a few in the full-length abaya or the Iranian-style chador, a handful with heads uncovered. Under the new constitution a quarter of the 275 seats are reserved for women, making the level of female representation among

Our work has to be secret. In Baghdad we couldnt open a shelter for women, we would be attacked

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Women and power

Battle is joined in the ght for equality

Victories in the struggle for rights are marred by a pandemic of violence
Annie Kelly
Demanding equal power for women is dangerous in many countries. Last November Maryam Hosseinkhah and Jelveh Javaheri, who are leading womens rights activists in Iran, were arrested and jailed for refusing to stop campaigning for more rights for women and for changes to Irans discriminatory legal system. They are part of the million signitures campaign, a petition launched by equal rights activists in Iran to protest at its parliaments attempts to push through Family Law legislation, which the women say will reverse the few legal rights they have. While imprisoned, Hosseinkhah and Javaheri began to campaign for better conditions for their fellow inmates. On their release last month the prison inspector where they had been jailed said their presence had been a blessing and asked them to continue to lobby for improvements. Grassroots movements calling for equal rights and an end to discrimination against women have been slowly building momentum worldwide. There has been a recognition that a rights-based approach, which focuses on the fundamental right for women to participate equally in the economic, social and political power structures of whatever country they live in, is a great force for change, and one that if properly supported could do more than western development agencies could dream of achieving, says Ceri Hayes, a senior policy ocer at the UK development agency Womankind Worldwide. For decades development agencies have been arguing that empowering women economically is essential to tackling global poverty. More than 70% of the poor are women, but women also produce between 60% and 80% of food in most developing countries. In Burkina Faso, development agency Plan says that if women farmers had as much access to resources as the men in their communities then agricultural productivity would increase by more than 20%. It is indisputable that tackling discrimination and working on the empowerment of women in the home, in the workplace and at a national and international level, is going to be the only way that we combat poverty and hunger, says Marie Staunton, Plans director. In Bangladesh the growth of a garment industry for export has brought Open doors policy . . . Bangladeshi activists take part in a rally in Dhaka calling for equal political rights for women Abir Abdullah/EPA women and girls and since 1990 the share of girls who are not in school has fallen. But there is still a long way to go, as 10 million more girls than boys are out of primary school and two thirds of illiterate young people are women. Campaigners for womens rights say that the global pandemic of violence against women is an enormous barrier to real progress towards equal rights and civil participation. Sexual violence against women has been both the weapon and one of the spoils of war in Rwanda, Bosnia, Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Burma, East Timor, Colombia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Sudan and Nepal. Each year, more than 135 million women are victims of genital mutilation and 700,000 are tracked for sex work. There have been small successes. In 1993 groups including Amnesty International successfully lobbied for gender violence to be included in international human rights law for the rst time and pushed for a clarication in the UNs Convention of the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women to make it explicit that the state has the obligation to educate and to challenge and end any practices that convene the rights of women. Now, according to international law, no state and no man can say, but this is our culture when it comes to harming or repressing women or justifying abuses like genital mutilation or child marriages, says Harvey. Whether this actually prevents behaviour in practice is, of course, another question, but its a start. Harvey also says that we should look at the impact that the British governments actions have had on the position of women in Iraq. Preoccupation Iraq had one of the most developed codes about women and family in the Middle East, but womens groups are now saying the new code being tabled by the present government will put their rights back 20 years. The response of our government seems to be this is democracy, which, seeing as womens rights were cited as one of the reasons for occupation in the rst place, is ironic. Harvey says that although the grassroots movements are ghting hard for empowerment, women are still being hung out to dry by governments across the world. And we all have the responsibility to make sure that this is not the future of the world for the millions of girls growing up being told they are second-class citizens.

women into the paid labour market for the rst time. Over the past 20 years female leaders in its growing trade union movement have been winning battles for better conditions and pay for millions of female factory workers. In the West the natural reaction is to think of women slaving away in garment factories as victims, but 10 years ago you didnt see women on the streets of Bangladesh and the garment industry has meant a massive change in the prole of women as paid workers, says Naila Kabeer, a professor at the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex. The trade union movement in Bangladesh has risen up from the factory oor and has seen women redening themselves as earners, prepared to use the labour courts and go out on the streets demanding better pay. And once youve given this kind of power to women its dicult to take it back. But the fight is far from won. According to womens groups, it is

Ending inequality is the only way we can combat poverty and hunger

only just beginning. Although progress has been made in countries that have enabled women to participate in social, economic and political power in Rwanda there are now equal numbers of women and men in government only 17.5% of all parliamentarians worldwide are women. According to the World Economic Forum, in some regions, especially sub-Saharan Africa, women provide 70% of agricultural labour but are not represented in budget deliberations. There are an estimated 40 million refugees worldwide and 80% of them are women and children. Belinda Calaguas, the director of policy and campaigns at ActionAid UK, says it is clear that governments and international donors are still failing to address the root causes of discrimination and repression of women. One of the most neglected areas is maternal care and sexual health. International gures show women continue to die of pregnancy-related causes at the rate of one a minute worldwide. In Africa 75% of young people living with HIV/Aids are female. The frustrating thing is that where governments have focused their attention with targeted investment in reducing poverty we can see the results, says Calaguas. In primary education the spotlight was put on