Back in the spring, when the Pakistani Taliban still controlled the Swat valley, video footage of a girl being flogged became one of the most powerful images of their rule. The footage, shot on a mobile phone and circulated on YouTube, turned public opinion against the Taliban and helped lay the groundwork for a military offensive there.

In the latest spate of bombings sweeping Pakistan, women have again become targets.  First came the twin suicide bombing on the International Islamic University in Islamabad which included an attack on the women's canteen.  Then last week, more than 100 people were killed in the car bombing of a bazaar in Peshawar which was frequented largely by women.

"It was the deadliest bombing in Pakistan in two years and its target was clear: not the police, not the security forces, not political leaders, but Peshawar’s women," wrote Rafia Zakaria in the Daily Times. "The site of the blast, Peshawar’s Meena Bazar, as is well known in the area, is an exclusively women’s shopping area where women and children shop for clothing, household wares and similar goods. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of those killed were women and children."

"While the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan have denied involvement in the bombing, investigations, the modus operandi of the attack and most importantly the target of the bombing all point to their culpability. Most significant of these factors is that the attack targeted women. It is after all females who have borne the brunt of the TTP’s onslaught since they began their reign of terror in the northwest of Pakistan. As the Taliban’s war against the Pakistani state has ensued, the marginalisation of women, the destruction of schools constructed for their education and their banishment from public spaces like the Meena Bazar have been a central facet of the Taliban’s campaign of terror and hatred. This latest attack thus fits perfectly into this grimly familiar design. The massive and indiscriminate killing of scores of innocent women and children who had dared to leave the walls of their home inculcates the very fear that the Taliban seek to instil among Pakistani women across the country."

There are many overlapping reasons for women being killed, of which forcing them to stay at home is only one.  Misogyny, in any culture, has always been the preserve of the weak who cannot show their power in any other way. So what seems to be happening here is actually about power. By attacking women and children, along with the teenage girls in Islamabad University, the militants can prove they will stop at nothing in order to drive fear into the civilian population.

My question is how this should be addressed.

In Afghanistan, the west has begun to "load-shed" the rights of women on the grounds that the environment is already complicated enough.

But what if we turn this around and say that the only way to respond to the current wave of violence sweeping Afghanistan and Pakistan is by looking at the 50 percent of the population who are women?

 Please post whatever links you can, and I'll collect and make sense of them.

(Photos: funeral of a girl killed in Islamabad; after the bombing in Peshawar)

Disaffected Anglican Dioceses in Papua New Guinea, the United States and Australia might consider switching to Roman Catholicism under a new constitution offered by Pope Benedict, according to Forward in Faith (FiF), a worldwide association of Anglicans opposed to the ordination of women priests or bishops. About a dozen bishops from the Church of England, the Anglican mother church, are also likely to convert, it says.

(Photo: Vatican Cardinal William Levada announces offer to Anglicans, 20 Oct 2009/Tony Gentile)

The Church of England could not comment on numbers likely to convert, with one source adding: "It's all guesswork." But Stephen Parkinson, director of FiF, said a figure of 1,000 Church of England priests, reported in the media, was "credible." Read our news story on this here.

Estimates of laity are "much harder," Parkinson said.  "Inevitably if you say 1,000 priests you are then talking about several thousand laity."

But he said he "would not be at all surprised at a dozen" bishops in England switching. However, in England, bishops were likely to move individually rather than take their entire dioceses, which tend to have diverse views, with them. Some Anglican clergy anticipated numbers would not be great, pointing to the early 1990s when about 500 switched over the ordination of women priests. Some later returned to Anglicanism.

Outside the Anglican Communion, a breakaway group called the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC) looks keen to join the Catholic Church along with its 400,000 followers. Archbishop John Hepworth, the Australia-based head of the TAC, posted a delighted reply to Pope Benedict's offer on his website. The TAC petitioned the Vatican to be received into the Church two years ago.  Archbishop Hepworth wrote:

"We are profoundly moved by the generosity of the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI...  May I firstly state that this is an act of great goodness on the part of the Holy Father. He has dedicated his pontificate to the cause of unity. It more than matches the dreams we dared to include in our petition of two years ago. It more than matches our prayers... I have made a commitment to the Traditional Anglican Communion that the response of the Holy See will be taken to each of our National Synods. They have already endorsed our pathway. Now the Holy See challenges us to seek in the specific structures that are now available the “full, visible unity, especially Eucharistic communion”, for which we have long prayed and about which we have long dreamed. That process will begin at once."

What do you think? Will large numbers of Anglicans switch to Rome?

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- Glenda Stone is chief executive and founder of Aurora, a recruitment advertising and market intelligence company, and co-chairs the UK Women’s Enterprise Taskforce established by Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The opinions expressed are her own.-

A theory once proposed by Estée Lauder Companies chairman, Leonard Lauder, was that in times of economic downfall women purchase more lipstick.

Referred to globally as the “Lipstick Index”, the theory asserts that in times of economic distress women substitute expensive fashion items for less expensive grooming and “feel good” items such as lipstick.

Estée Lauder observed this phenomenon following the Sept. 11, attacks in 2001. It has also been touted by such iconic beauty houses as Yves Saint Laurent and Chanel. Even Bobby Brown launched their 10 shades of lipstick range in 1991 right in the middle of a big recession.

So lipstick may be the female morale booster as were the comic Charlie Chaplin films released during the Great Depression of the 1930s, but will it be enough to pull women out of the doldrums when there simply are just not enough jobs to go around?

Reviewing women’s participation in paid employment over the decades, Office for National Statistics findings show that in 1971 the UK employment rate for women was 56 percent compared with 70 percent by the end of 2008.

This compares with a similar decrease in men’s employment rate for the same period, with UK male employment falling from 92 percent to 78 percent. In 2008, more than 12.5 million working age women in the UK were in paid formal employment, with 40 percent working part-time compared to around 11 per cent of working men. The all-time record high for UK employment was in Q3 2007 at 29.1 million.

But what has been happening for professional women throughout the economic downfall and are more women than men being made redundant - and if so why?

Numerous research studies have been published and they differ greatly on their findings. The ONS, in Q1 2009, stated that estimates suggested fewer women than men were being made redundant with the redundancy rate for women in the three months to December 2008 being 6.6 per 1,000 employees, less than half that for men which was 13.6 per 1,000 employees. Yet the UK’s Trades Union Congress (TUC) stated that since the start of 2008 the female redundancy rate increased by 2.3 percentage points almost double the rate of male increase at 1.2 percentage points.

In some parts of the UK such as in the North West region, data shows that the rate of women’s unemployment has increased at almost double the rate of male unemployment since the start of the downturn.

Some areas and reasons why women are being specifically affected by the recession is that women are more likely to work in part-time roles which are significantly reduced during a downturn. Also, if government spending cuts prevail then more women will find their jobs at risk as there are more women than men employed in the public sector.

A further impact is that women are more likely than men to be in lower paid work, and so are less likely to have savings and as such face greater risk of more immediate poverty through unemployment. With the added complexity of childcare responsibilities, women may also find it harder to re-enter the workforce. Some research studies have also cited more pregnant women than childless women being targeted for redundancy.

And then there is always that territorial Darwinism factor - survival of the fittest. Will women compete as actively as men for fewer positions?

The Women’s Enterprise Task Force I co-Chair produced a research report into “Women in the recession” and found, amongst other things, that women’s enterprise is well sustained in a down market due to the low-risk, cost-contained models predominantly used by female business. It will be interesting to see whether women leaving corporate sector through redundancy do actually decide to “go it alone’ and set up shop for themselves … but hopefully not selling lipstick!

The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the author’s alone. Sughra Ahmed is a Research Fellow at the Policy Research Centre, which is based at the Islamic Foundation in Leicestershire and specialises in research, policy advice and training on issues related to British Muslims.

By Sughra Ahmed

It may seem well and good to think children should be seen and not heard - there's nothing wrong with a touch of Victorian, especially true during a good movie! But what if the censored are not young children at all? What if they are flashpoints in our conversations on not so trivial subjects, you know, things like national security, integration and democracy. And what if, instead of listening, we systematically speak on their behalf, saying what they are thinking and how they fit into the whole social and political spectrum.

(Photo: Woman at "Muslims Against Terrorism" rally in London, 11 Sept 2007/Toby Melville)

Enter young British Muslims, but please sit down over there in one group, and mind you don't speak - we have interpreters for that: a choice of representative institutions, community spokespersons, experts on what young people think, and media sound bytes. Yes, much is said and written about young Muslims, not only in black ink but leapfrogging from blog to blog and showing no signs of tiring. Rarely though, is it the young voices themselves. Commentators of many persuasions seem keen to tell us how and what a silent majority from British Muslims think. If it's not the majority then certainly a large proportion .

Let's take a look at the basics: nearly half of British Muslims are under 25 and overwhelmingly British born, about a third are 16 or under. Half are women (I feel a need to state the obvious) and most are not in northern former mill towns (less than 5% of British Muslims actually live in ‘popular imagination' Bradford).

We are used to hearing about young Muslims in the context of radicalisation of Muslim opinion, but their lives are far more complex. There is an untold story of intergenerational challenges, the role of community leadership and its short comings as well as alienation from institutions of wider society. But the picture is not all bad - young people feel a strong sense of national pride and really want to do things to make their lives better.

These were some of the considerations surrounding my report released today called Seen and Not Heard: Voices of Young British Muslims, published by the Policy Research Centre. Here's the Reuters news story on it -- "Young British Muslims angry with police and media." Interestingly 45% of the young people I spoke with were female; hearing their thoughts, feelings and aspirations was enlightening. Young women are often sidelined from mainstream debates both within Muslim organisations and wider British society. Hearing their audible views and concerns alongside and with their male counterparts reflects the invaluable contribution they have to make - they had a lot on their minds.

The voices of young British Muslims - and especially those of women - are increasingly valuable when we speak of intergenerational challenges within Muslim communities. These are exacerbated by the different cultural environments and influences in which generations have grown up. Some young Muslims, from both sexes, tend to face two different worlds in their lives - one inside and one outside the home - as a way to negotiate the intergenerational gap that evidently is due to a communication divide on the basis of language, but also ideas of modern life and ways as well as cultural taboos.

Young Muslims often see such taboos in terms of what they can or cannot speak to their parents about, how concepts such as respecting your elders is a key influence in how they engage with older people and interestingly the way they operate in their social circles outside the home. These  illustrate some of the difficult challenges young British Muslim are negotiating on a daily basis. These challenges are even greater for young women as the traditional norms restrain them from making choices for themselves and their own lives in relation to education, social activities and who they spend time with.

Then we have the role of religion in their lives. Young British Muslims often feel perturbed at suggestions of friction or even conflict between their religion and their national identity. Instead, young people argue there is a sense of synergy between their faith and their British (or in some cases Scottish and Welsh) identities. The role of faith for many young people is a peripheral aspect of who they are. Over time, as they grow into ‘older young people' it becomes an aspect some focus on more, all the while in the context of growing up as young Brits.

(Photo: Central mosque in Birmingham, 31 Jan 2007/Darren Staples)

If we are to make effective social connections, we need to invest in young people and their development, for example through the creation of more mentoring schemes, development of leadership and work to facilitate role models. Voluntary sector organisations can reach a sizeable number of young women. Whilst the space they provide and mix of projects they run is admirable, they would benefit from specialised youth skills training and long-term investment to let young people speak for themselves. Surely it is the voice of young British Muslims that will enable the rest of us to better engage the very audience we seek to understand - let them tell us with their own voices and let us listen!

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-- Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. The views expressed are her own. –-

Although women moved into the workforce in great numbers in the 1980s, they still have to catch up to men in terms of leadership positions in corporate America. The New York human resources firm Catalyst found that women hold 16.9 percent of officer positions in American corporations, and only 11 percent of senior leadership line roles.

The question is, why are there so few women corporate board members? Those who have a proclivity to assume sex discrimination might fear the worst. Others might simply assume that relatively few qualified women were available for board slots, or that boards with women performed poorly in the marketplace.

Earlier this month the London School of Economics released a new study showing that publicly-traded companies with more women on the boards of directors do better in terms of firm management but worse in terms of economic performance. The study, entitled Women in the Boardroom and Their Impact on Governance and Performance, was just published in the Journal of Financial Economics.

The authors, economists Renee Adams of the University of Queensland, Australia, and Daniel Ferreira, of the London School of Economics, conclude that additional women improve the governance of the firm. Female board members were more likely to be assigned to audit, nominating, and corporate governance committees and they had higher attendance at board meetings. Chief executive officers of companies with female directors are held to a higher standard of accountability.

Surprisingly, the authors claim to have statistical results that reveal precisely this politically incorrect result: firms with women on board have lower return on assets than firms without women board members. The firms are less profitable and have lower financial performance.

If that result seems counter-intuitive, you may be correct. The statistical results presented by the authors are not robust to changes in specification, and many of the key estimated parameters are not significantly different from zero. Even more troubling, some of the statistical techniques employed appear to be poorly chosen.

The authors used data from 1996 to 2003 collected by the Investor Responsibility Research Center, a group that funds research on corporate governance, and ExecuComp, a database that tracks compensation of the top five directors in S&P 500, S&P 400 MidCap and S&P SmallCap 600 indexes. The sample contained data on 1,939 firms and, within these, 86,714 directorships.

On average, these firms had slightly more than 9 board members each, but 39 percent of the annual observations are firms with no women. Moreover, 40 percent of observations were firms with only one woman on the board. Thus, fully 79 percent of the observations are firms with boards with either one or no women on the board. On average, fewer than 10 percent of all directors are women.

Professor Ferreira explained his results this way in a press release issued by LSE, ”Our research shows that women directors are doing their jobs very well. But a tough board, with more monitoring, may not always be a good thing. Indeed we see that increased monitoring can be counter-productive in well-governed companies.”

He continued, “When you meddle in boards there may be unintended consequences. This is particularly important to bear in mind in the current context when companies are under increasing pressure to change the composition of their boards.”

As the global economy struggles to recover from the recession, this conclusion is worth bearing in mind. Women will only be harmed if it is perceived that they have gained their directorships through a system of quotas. Rather, they need to make sure that they put in the hours of work and go for the tough negotiating strategy so that they move to the top on their own and gain board seats on their own merit.

-- Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. The views expressed are her own. –-

One of the concerns of working women is the “pay gap” – the alleged payment to women of 78 cents for every dollar earned by a man.  But there are more behind these numbers than first meets the eye, because women work different hours, major in different subjects, and choose different careers.

The 78 percent figure comes from comparing the 2007 full-time median annual earnings of women with men, the latest year available from the Census Bureau.  The 2007 Department of Labor data show that women’s full-time median weekly earnings are 80 percent of men’s.

Just comparing men and women who work 40 hours weekly, without accounting for differences in jobs, training, or time in the labor force, yields a ratio of 87.2 percent, with a smaller pay gap.

These wage ratios are calculated from government data and do not take into account differences in education, job title and responsibility, regional labor markets, work experience, occupation, and time in the workforce.  When economic studies include these major determinants of income, rather than simple averages of all men and women’s salaries, the pay gap shrinks even more.

A report by Jody Feder and Linda Levine of the Congressional Research Service entitled “Pay Equity Legislation in the 110th Congress,” declared that “Although these disparities between seemingly comparable men and women sometimes are taken as proof of sex-based wage inequities, the data have not been adjusted to reflect gender differences in all characteristics that can legitimately affect relative wages (e.g. college major or uninterrupted years of employment).”

Many academic studies of gender discrimination focus on the measurement of the wage gap.  Dozens of studies have been published in academic journals over the past two decades.  These studies attempt to measure the contributing effects of all the factors that could plausibly explain the wage gap.  The remaining portion of the wage gap that cannot be explained by measurable variables is frequently termed “discrimination.”

Generally, the more information about women that is included in the analysis, the more of the wage gap that can be explained, and the less is the residual portion attributable to “discrimination.”  An analysis that omits relevant information finds a greater unexplained residual, and concludes that there is more discrimination.

Simple wage ratios do not take into account other determinants of income.  A female nurse might earn less than a male orthopedic surgeon.  But this would not be termed “unfair” or “discrimination” because the profession of surgeon requires more years of education, the surgeon might work different hours from the nurse, and the nurse might have fewer continuous years of work experience due to family considerations.

Baruch College economics professor June O’Neill, in an article published in 2003, shows that when data on demographics, education, scores on the Armed Forces Qualification Test, work experience, child-related factors, and percent female in the occupation are analyzed, the wage ratio becomes 97.5 percent, an insignificant difference.

In another study, Professors Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago and Kevin Hallock of Cornell University found almost no difference in the pay of male and female top corporate executives when accounting for size of firm, position in the company, age, seniority, and experience.

Lower pay can reflect decisions—by men and women--about field of study, occupation, and time in the workforce.  Those who don’t finish high school earn less.  College graduates who major in humanities rather than the sciences have lower incomes.  More women than men choose humanities majors.

Employers pay workers who have taken time out of the work force less than those with more experience on the job, and many women work fewer hours for family reasons.  When women choose jobs that allow more flexibility and less travel in order to accommodate family, they find that they end up earning less.

Yet a choice of more time out of the workforce with less money rather than more time in the workforce with more income is not a social problem.  A society that gives men and women these choices, as does ours, is something to applaud.

Although documented cases of discrimination exist, and are rightly settled in the courts, when all the factors behind the pay numbers are calculated, men and women earn about the same.

A new poll shows public opinion in Pakistan has turned sharply against the Taliban and other Islamist militants, even though they still do not trust the United States and President Barack Obama. Reporting on the poll, our Asia specialist in Washington, Paul Eckert, said the WorldPublicOpinion.org poll, conducted in May as Pakistan's army fought the Taliban in the Swat Valley, found that 81 percent saw the Pakistani Taliban and al Qaeda as a critical threat to the country, a jump from 34 percent in a similar poll in late 2007. Read Eckert's report here.

(Photo: Pakistani Taliban in Swat, 2 Nov 2007/Sherin Zada Kanju)

The poll shows a wide divergence between Pakistani public opinion and the views of the Taliban on the implementation of sharia, a religious issue sometimes cited to help explain earlier tolerance of the militants. Some 80 percent of the respondents said sharia permits education for girls, one of the first services the Taliban close down when they gain control of an area. And 75 percent said sharia allows women to work, which the Taliban do not.

Reflecting their distrust, 71 percent said they believed the Taliban would not even submit to the sharia courts that they themselves have set up or promised to install as a pure and speedy alternative to Pakistan's corrupt and inefficient civil courts. Only 14 percent supported the Taliban claim that it could provide more effective and timely justice than the state, a claim that partly helped the Islamist militants in the past (although it must be added that only 56 percent expressed trust in the civil courts). Only 9 percent said they thought the Taliban would do better at fighting corruption than the government, which got a lukewarm 47 percent. In any case, these results seem to indicate very little support for trademark Taliban promises that once seemed attractive.

If accurate, these findings mark a major shift from the results of a similar poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org in late 2007, not long after the Pakistani army flushed out Islamist militants who had taken control of the Red Mosque complex in the heart of Islambad. More than 100 died in the raid, including dozens of suspected militants and at least 10 troops. Some 64 percent said the raid was a mistake while only 22 percent supported the decision. A 60 percent majority believed that sharia should play a larger role in Pakistani law than it did at the time.

(Photo: Anti-Taliban rally in Lahore, 19 June 2009/Mohsin Raza)

Another poll, by the International Republican Institute, relativises this shift a bit. Conducted in March, before the height of the Taliban-army clash in Swat and the video of Taliban flogging a teenage local girl that reportedly turned Pakistani opinion against the militants, it shows more sympathy for the Taliban's sharia demands. While 74 percent said religious extremism was a problem in Pakistan, 80 percent supported the introduction of sharia in Swat and 72 percent supported the government peace deal with the Taliban there. Some 56 percent said they would support the Taliban if they demanded sharia in other cities such as Karachi, Multan, Quetta or Lahore.

The relationship between traditional religious views and the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan is so complex that I'm not sure any poll gives a very accurate picture. Unfortunately, neither poll examined in greater detail what those polled thought about sharia and how much of it should be applied in Pakistan. Does anyone have other poll results that give what they think is a better picture?

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UPDATE (July 2) Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid has an interesting opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times saying: "The Pakistani public, army and government have suddenly awakened to the Taliban threat. That is a crucial first step. But it will need strong international support to effectively respond."

- Donald Steinberg, Deputy President for Policy of International Crisis Group, is a board member of the Women’s Refugee Commission and served on the UNIFEM executive director’s advisory council. The opinions expressed are his own. -

Preparations are now starting for the 10th anniversary of the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security. This groundbreaking resolution was passed unanimously in October 2000 to address abuses against women during armed conflict, including sexual violence and displacement, and to bring women more fully into conflict prevention and peacemaking.

Resolution 1325 was properly hailed as a road map to promote, among other steps, women’s full engagement in peace negotiations, gender balance in post-conflict governments, properly trained peacekeepers and local security forces, protection for displaced women and accountability for sexual violence. It urged the Secretary-General to bring a gender perspective to all peacekeeping operations and other UN programs, and called for greater funding for measures to protect women during armed conflict and rebuild institutions that matter to women.

The key problem with the celebration plans is that there really is not that much to celebrate. The promise of Resolution 1325 is so far largely a dream deferred. Women continue to be raped and trafficked in conflict situations with impunity, both by rebel forces and by government militaries charged with protecting them. Women peace builders still face severe legal and cultural discrimination; coupled with sexual violence and threats against them, this imposes a victimization and danger that makes even the most courageous women think twice before stepping forward.

In recent peace negotiations in Indonesia, Nepal, Somalia, Cote d’Ivoire, the Philippines and Central African Republic, not a single woman served as a negotiator, mediator, signatory or witness. Men leading peace conferences still exclude women or shunt them off to ante-rooms while “real” negotiations take place, thus producing agreements that are disconnected from ground-truth and less likely to be successful and enjoy popular support.

The absence of women’s participation still silences their voices on issues of internal displacement, trafficking in women and girls, sexual violence, abuses by security forces, maternal health care and girls’ education. Such concerns are typically given short shrift in peace processes and reconstruction efforts, and provided inadequate funding. The UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) estimates that less than 6 percent of funds committed in donors conferences after peace accords are targeted in any way towards women.

The UN has failed to lead by example. The UN’s gender architecture on armed conflict is a hodgepodge, with no lead agency and no clear division of responsibilities between UNIFEM, the Special Adviser for Gender Issues, the Division for the Advancement of Women, the Commission on the Status of Women, the Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, the Peacebuilding Commission, the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, UNDP’s Bureau of Conflict Prevention and Reconstruction (BCPR) and others.

All are filled with dedicated people doing their best – the recent BCPR decision to deploy 10 new senior gender advisers is a welcome example – but they are under-funded, under-supported by senior officials and poorly coordinated. Their work is further complicated by the absence of time-bound goals backed by monitoring, accountability and enforcement mechanisms.

Some believe that these issues will be addressed in the on-going debate over restructuring how the UN deals with gender issues in general. But the ideal solution – a single agency with at least $1 billion in dedicated funding, a so-called “UNICEF for Women” – seems beyond reach. Even piece-meal reforms, including the oddly named “Composite Entity”, are locked up in the same issues that killed the helpful proposals made by then Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2006. For women now being raped in eastern Congo, the single-minded focus on an institutional and architectural solution risks becoming more of a distraction than an ally. The answer lies more in specific actions than in big-bang structural changes.

It is not too late to ensure a 10th anniversary of Resolution 1325 that is worth celebrating. As a first step, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Deputy Secretary-General Asha Rose Migiro should appoint an advisory panel on 1325 of prominent international figures from developing and developed countries with past engagement on gender and armed conflict and knowledge of the UN system. More than a shop-talk or report-writing exercise, the advisory panel would propose and be empowered to help implement specific reforms and practical steps in the UN system, member states and the broader international community to better protect women in conflict situations and ensure their participation in building peace.

The panel should develop and help implement accountability mechanisms by identifying time-bound goals, proposing measurement criteria, determining responsibility for implementation, and defining rewards and sanctions to ensure compliance by individuals and agencies within the UN system. It would seek to reverse the shameful situation in which women fill only two of the Secretary-General’s 40 posts for country-specific special representatives. Among additional steps could be:

• Charging a single entity with overseeing the 1325 agenda, working in tandem with a permanent Security Council working group;
• Establishing a watchlist of countries and non-state actors of concern to be named and shamed into improving their records;
• Ensuring periodic reports by the Secretary-General to the Security Council on the status of 1325 implementation; and
• Enshrining the principle that sanctions will be adopted on governments and non-state actors that fail to meet international standards of protection.

If these items seem a stretch, it is important to remember that each of these measures now applies to the protection of children in armed conflict under UNSC Resolution 1612.

The panel’s success would not be measured by the reports it issues or the publicity it generates. It would come in changing the lives of women on the ground, securing seats for women in peace negotiations and post-conflict governance, preventing armed thugs from abusing women, holding government security forces and warlords alike accountable for sexual violence against women, preventing traffickers from turning women and girls into commodities, building strong civil society networks for women and ending the stigma of victimization that bedevils women leaders.

Now that would be an accomplishment worth celebrating.

-- Daniela Drake, M.D., attended Wellesley College and received an MBA from Stanford University. She, along with Elizabeth Ford, authored the book "Smart Girls Marry Money." A former McKinsey consultant, she is now a full-time primary care physician. Drake married (for love) and has reaped the consequences. The views expressed are her own. --

I had to pause when I came across a blog out of South Africa that read, “I think a way forward, or backwards some of you might say, is to encourage our smart, savvy and capable daughters to marry for money.” Since I co-authored a book with a similar premise, this sassy assertion definitely grabbed my attention.

The blog’s author Jackie May, an editor for The Times world pages in South Africa, penned these seemingly heretical comments after learning of alarming research by Dr. Caroline Gatrell at Lancaster University in England. Dr. Gatrell found, “women who explicitly choose career over kids are often vilified at work.”

Huh?

Conventional wisdom says just the opposite: Sacrificing baby-making is often necessary in the calculus of getting ahead at work. Many mid-career women have forsaken motherhood to obtain career goals. Indeed, economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett made news a few years ago when she presented the statistic that 49% of mid-career women who made $100,000 a year or more were childless, compared to only 10% of men.

Yet, despite the sacrifices many women make in order to climb the corporate ladder, women are still woefully under represented in top executive ranks. Eight of the CEO’s on the Fortune 500 were women a couple of years ago. Now, two years later, we’ve got 12. At this rate it will take a little over 100 years for us to represent half of the CEO’s in the Fortune 500, in the year 2128.

Although the number of CEO’s is a lofty benchmark, in general even at the lower reaches, workplace parity is coming at a glacial pace. The reasons are complicated, and it isn’t just sexism. Many have suggested that it has to do with the choices women make to fulfill personal life ambitions.

Even today, many young women don’t foresee that these choices will affect their career success. Hewlett’s more recent national survey found that the typical young woman graduate plans to have a high paying job, take two to three years off to have children and benefit from career flexibility that lets her pop back in to the workplace when the mood strikes.

While Hewlett found the women’s optimism charming, she also noted that this generation follows hot on the high-heels of a generation of women who had similar ideas. By following non-linear career paths, that generation “lost 18…to 37% of their earning power,” and suffered a complete “downsizing of their ambitions.”

But the new graduates aren’t heeding the warning signs of the slightly more senior women’s failures.

These young women are counting on their talents to grant them repeated entrée into a marketplace they were brought up to believe is a meritocracy. The bad old days are behind us, as one co-ed commented to Hewlett, “Back then—when there were dinosaurs—people just did bad stuff to women.”

But is this true, or are people still doing bad stuff to women? If Dr. Caroline Gatrell’s study is right, women who have sacrificed important personal goals are penalized at work. As Gatrell’s study indicates: Childless women are viewed as lacking an “essential humanity” and viewed as unfit to manage others.

Yet at the same time Gatrell assures us that mothers don’t fare much better. Gatrell avers, “Women with children are blamed for combining motherhood with paid work and women with no children are sidelined and discounted because they are not mothers.”

The problem of women in the workplace is so complicated that the answers themselves sound like Orwellian double-speak. Or, have we at long last entered an age when double-speak simply means that both things can be true, that workplace discrimination can take on many forms and that there are no easy answers? But one thing is certain: achieving success in the workplace is like winning a competition. If half the entering team shows up thinking it’s something less than that, then men will still have the home field advantage—and achieving parity may take more than the 100 years estimated by my back-of-the-envelope calculation.

So what will I say if my daughter asks me, “How can I make sure my life is financially secure?”

I would have to pause before I answer. I would have to consider that in all likelihood she won’t live to see true workplace equality. But her life matters now. So I will have my own Orwellian answer for her and offer it with a hefty dose of irony, “Apply yourself at school and at work. And to cover all your bases, marry a man with money.”

- Brigitte Triems is president of the European Women’s Lobby, the largest non-governmental women’s organisation in the European Union, representing approximately 2000 organisations in 30 European Countries. Working with its members at national and European levels, the EWL’s main objective is to fight for gender equality and to ensure the integration of a gender perspective in all EU policy areas. The opinions expressed are her own. -

Some Europeans like to claim that we have achieved equality between women and men in Europe, and that the struggle for equality belongs to another, preferably faraway, region. Unfortunately there is little reality behind these claims.

Fresh figures show that the average gender pay gap in Europe is 17,4 percent and that women’s job security is more precarious than those of men.

Women are largely under-represented at decision-making levels both nationally and at a European level. Only 22 percent of the members of national parliaments are women in the EU, and of the seats in the European Parliament barely a third are filled by women.

Violence against women is persistent throughout Europe, and women’s right to abortion is being denied or restricted in several EU countries.

International Women’s Day is a day for all those who strive for equality and justice. The realities outlined above are some of the reasons why women’s movements remain mobilised throughout Europe, and in particular on International Women’s Day. This is a day that is relevant for all citizens who want to contribute to a more just and sustainable society in which women and men share political and economic responsibilities, where care for elderly and children is shared between women and men and made a societal concern rather than a private one, and where women live lives free from violence.

However, it is also important to be aware that women in Europe face a range of realities and struggles. The possibility of creating a more just society will largely depend upon integrating migrant women, lesbians, and disabled women into the core political processes.

The world of economics has a gender. It is male. With the financial crisis and the now evident systemic challenges, gender imbalances become even more striking. Every television screen and panel features male politicians and male economists, often the very same men that engineered the current financial meltdown, whom we are asked to trust to come up with solutions.

Feminists across Europe demand a different approach than patch it up and go on with “business-as-usual.” A gendered analysis of our economies as based on both productive and reproductive work, and how this can and must be coupled with issues of equality, should together with sustainable development perspectives become center stage at a moment where we look for new models for the financial and economic systems.

Equality is the only forward option for Europe. In view of the importance of the upcoming European elections in June 2010, and the opportunity it creates for change at European level, European Women’s Lobby has launched a campaign “No modern European democracy without gender equality - 50/50,” calling for more women in decision making at all levels. Having more women in decision-making is a question of democracy and it is about fully recognizing women as actors of change, as driving forces of sustainable social, economic, and environmental development in Europe. The 50/50 campaign is supported by more than half of the current 27 European Commissioners, and over 200 prominent supporters have signed up to the campaign.

Sign the petition and take action - European Women’s Lobby 50/50 Campaign website