Elimination of Gender Disparity in Education

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Abstract: The Millennium Development Goals are eight goals set by the United Nations Millennium Summit set to be achieved by 2015, to overcome the main development challenges of the world. Of these, the third goal is the one regarding gender equality and empowerment of women. My studies show that women are truly suffering the world over in various ways. They are not given proper education, health care and face discrimination in the workplace, and suffer violence at home. The Millennium Goals are aimed at various development challenges in the world but according to various scholars, women empowerment and gender equality are the ones that can impact all other challenges as well. For example, poverty reduction can happen only with women empowerment.

Towards achieving this goal, there are seven strategies to be followed to reach the goal and four indicators used to measure the progress. The four indicators are education, employment, literacy, and political participation all of which can be boiled down to one indicator: education. By educating women, they can be made employable, literate, and able to stand on political grounds. Thus, the education of women is truly the main priority of this goal. It has been part of the plan that most of the targets had to be reached by 2005. However, the world still lags in its pursuit of the third MDG. Women continue to suffer in different ways in different parts of the world. They need to be rescued from domestic violence and also from environment-induced problems such as carrying water and roaming for fuel. Overall, it has been found and I to agree, that education, employment, and political participation do strengthen the cause of women but what can bring about true women empowerment is a change in the way society perceives women. This can happen and the third MDG is achieved only when many support groups work together for the cause of gender equality and women empowerment.

Introduction

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are eight goals, set to be achieved by 2015, to overcome the main development challenges of the world. The MDGs are elicited from the Millennium Declaration that was adopted by 189 nations and signed by 147 heads of state and governments during the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000 (UNDP, 2008). The Millennium Declaration contains actions and targets. The eight-millennium development goals are broken down into 18 quantifiable targets that are measured by 48 indicators. The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, all by the target date of 2015. It provides a blueprint for global development based on agreement by all the world’s countries and all the world’s leading development institutions (UN, 2008).

The Third Goal

Kofi Annan in 2006 remarked, “It is impossible to realize our goals while discriminating against half the human race”. The third goal in the list of Millennium Development Goals is about eliminating gender disparity in primary and secondary education preferably by 2005, and at all levels by 2015. Poverty is often felt to be a reflection of the status of women in the world (UN, 2005, 105). Global prosperity and peace can be achieved only when all of the people in the world can become self-sufficient and independent. Societies, where women are treated in a more equal manner, can develop faster and achieve the Millennium Goals by 2015 (Millienniumcampaign, 2008). All the eight goals are directly related to women’s rights, and this implies that societies, where women are not afforded equal rights as men, can never sustainably achieve development. It has been found that in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, where women have been given the chance to succeed through small business loans or increased educational opportunities, families are stronger, economies are stronger, and societies are flourishing (Milleniumcampaign, 2008, 1).

Need for the third goal

Women are often the suppressed community in the world. This can be seen through the following facts: of the 1.3 billion people living in poverty around the world, 70% are women. (Source: World Revolution); women do about 66% of the world’s work in return for less than 5% of its income. (Source: Women’s International Network); in the least developed countries nearly twice as many women over age 15 are illiterate compared to men. (Source: UNFPA); two-thirds of children denied primary education are girls, and 75% of the world’s 876 million illiterate adults are women. (Source: AskWoman); women work two-thirds of the world’s working hours, produce half of the world’s food, and yet earn only 10% of the world’s income and own less than 1% of the world’s property. (Source: World Development Indicators, 1997, Womankind Worldwide). There is now increasing awareness of the loss to society as a result of persistent inequalities between women and men. The inclusion of gender equality and women’s empowerment as the third Millennium Development Goal (MDG) is a reminder that there must be more done towards the direction of empowerment of women (UN, 2005). According to Naila Kabeer, empowerment can be studied in three dimensions: agency, resources, and achievements. Agency needs to act in the direction of the goal through mobilization of resources and lead to achievements that truly empower women (Kabeer, 2003, 173).

Seven Strategic Priorities

The U.N. Millennium Project’s Task Force on Education and Gender Equality has outlined seven strategic priorities that require action today if Goal 3 is to be met within the next decade. These strategic priorities are found to be interdependent and independent of the setting. The seven strategic priorities are: strengthen opportunities for educating girls at the school level; guarantee sexual and reproductive health and rights; invest in infrastructure to reduce women’s and girls’ time burdens; guarantee women’s and girls’ property and inheritance rights; eliminate gender inequalities in employment by decreasing women’s reliance on informal employment, closing gender gaps in earnings, and reducing occupational segregation; increase women’s share of seats in national parliaments and local governmental bodies; and combat violence against girls and women (ICRW, 2008, 1-2). These priorities are already under implementation in many countries. However, if it were to succeed at the highest level by 2015, more political commitment is needed (UN, 2007).

Education for Women

In the realm of education, the Task Force identifies four strategies that can be used in a variety of countries: fees must be reduced and schooling made more affordable; schools should be preferable close to girls’ homes and allow flexible class schedules; schools should be made girl-friendly by improving the safety, design, and policies of schools, such as building latrines for girls and allowing married adolescents to attend school; and quality of education must be improved by training more women as teachers, especially in secondary schools, using gender-sensitive textbooks, and developing curriculum for girls that is strong in math and science (ICRW, 2008). The challenge of educating women is greatest in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, where scarcely half the eligible children attended primary school at the turn of the century (Black and White, 2003, 166).

Women Health Issues and Other Issues

Women’s reproductive health remains poor in many developing countries and has resulted in high rates of maternal mortality. Women in developing countries are at greater risk to die of pregnancy-related complications or suffer from sexually transmitted infections, particularly HIV. Women exposed to such risks must be kept well informed and also guaranteed universal access to sexual and reproductive health services through the primary health care system. In Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo, special training of non-specialist medical personnel, such as medical assistants and nurses, has led to lower maternal mortality rates. In the case of AIDS/HIV, counseling, prevention, and treatment services integrated with other reproductive health services are most effective in reaching women. Another problem faced by women is their responsibilities at home. Routine tasks such as drawing water, collecting firewood, or walking to a market can take most of their time. One study found that women in Zambia spent more than 800 hours a year collecting firewood and an additional 200 hours fetching water (Malmberg Calvo, 1994).

This time burden on women can be reduced by providing efficient energy sources, accessible and affordable transportation, and water and sanitation systems. Finally, increasing women’s participation in the design and implementation of these infrastructure projects can make these projects more accessible and affordable. In Mali, the U.N. Industrial Development Organization and the International Fund for Agriculture worked with communities and women’s groups to design and create platforms. In time, it was found that this helped women to save time and labor and shift into income-generating activities, leading to an average daily increase of $0.47. More girls also stayed in school until grade 5, and women’s health improved because they were able to visit local clinics more often (Modi 2004). Women in many countries do not have property rights and inheritance rights and ensuring these rights is a crucial step in empowering women. Ensuring joint titling during land registration can enhance women’s access to land and protect them against cheating spouses.

In Vietnam, marriage and family laws were revised in 2001, requiring both the husband’s and wife’s signature on any document registering family assets and land use rights. Ensuring that women are properly represented in the parliament empowers them (Prosterman and Hanstad 2003; Ravallion and van de Walle 2004; World Bank 2002). In only 14 countries women make up 30 percent or more of the seats in their national parliaments. Increasing women’s participation in politics can be done in three ways: gender quotas and reservations, strong women’s movements, and government policies. The preferential hiring of men, occupational segregation, and women receiving lower pay for equal work are all examples of ongoing gender inequality in employment. These employment barriers for women need to be addressed. Women in many countries are often exposed to violence (between 10 percent and 69 percent). To control domestic violence, there needs to be a combination of interventions taken in the form of legal, judicial, enforcement, and health measures. The Task Force recommends that the U.N. Secretary-General, alongside heads of state, must lead a campaign to end domestic violence the world over.

MDG project success around the world

Toward reaching Goal 3, the international development community had set 2005 as the year for achieving a first milestone: eliminating gender disparity in primary and secondary education. However, progress has been slow and this first target has been missed in 19 countries for primary education and 24 countries for secondary. Oxfam has reported that over 90 countries failed to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education by the deadline. To accelerate progress it has been found that the two most important steps are to remove fees for primary education and to improve school sanitation facilities to allow appropriate privacy for girls. However, this involves costs and in countries where school fees have been lifted, the resulting entry of new students has often exceeded the capacity of buildings and teachers (Oneworld.net, 2008). Although no country has successfully addressed all seven strategic priorities, some countries have shown that significant progress can be made to empower women and reduce gender disparities while some countries still lag in their journey towards achieving the third MDG by 2015. In Angola, barely 50% of women are literate and measures of the Gini coefficient show that inequality is rising (OneWorld.net, 2008).

In Guatemala, 87% of indigenous women are illiterate and only 1% attend secondary education. In Guinea-Bissau, schools are mostly non-operational for months at a time because of poverty. In Jordan, poor representation of women is recognized as a problem difficult to rectify by 2015. In Pakistan, the literacy of women is as low as 20%. Thailand is a country that may be on the way to achieving the third MDG. Literacy rates for women are 91% and overall health indicators for child and maternal mortality are progressing well (OneWorld.net, 2008). In Turkey, there are serious gaps in literacy rates between men and women. Women suffer discrimination and mostly work in the agricultural sector at low levels of productivity. Women in Uzbekistan of reproductive age have the highest anemia rates in the region. In Yemen, women’s literacy is low.

The 2005 Arab Human Development Report cites poverty and cultural attitudes to women, such as early marriage and segregation between the sexes, for the gender gap in education in Yemen. In a recent effort to boost girls’ primary enrolment and to meet the MDG goal of education for all by 2015, the Ministry of Education announced its decision to waive primary school tuition fees for female students. However, increasing evidence that as many as 400,000 children under 14 are engaged in child labor adds fresh concern (OneWorld.net, 2008). UN Progress Report on MDG 2007 holds that based on enrolment data, about 72 million children of primary school age were not in school in 2005; 57 percent of them were girls (UN, 2007, 2). Over half a million women still die each year from treatable and preventable complications of pregnancy and childbirth (UN, 2007, 4). This shows that much more needs to be done in all spheres of women’s empowerment.

Reasons for failure to reach targets

Generally, costs are not a barrier to the empowerment of women. The Task Force in collaboration with the U.N. Millennium Project has assessed in Tajikistan that the cost of universal primary and expanded secondary education would be roughly $20 per person annually and the cost of setting up a primary health care system for child and maternal health, major infectious diseases, and sexual and reproductive health would average about $29 per person annually. The cost of gender-specific interventions to meet Goal 3 in Tajikistan is estimated at $10.56 million each year and hence there seem to be no financial restraints to reaching the goal by 2015 (ICRW, 2008, 8). The actual reason why most of the countries are not able to address gender inequality effectively is that there is a lack of change on a large enough scale to transform the way societies perceive women. Achieving the goals will be impossible without closing the gaps between men and women in terms of capacities, access to resources and opportunities, and vulnerability to violence and conflict (UNDP, 2008).

Indicators to Measure Progress

Four indicators are used to measure progress towards the goal: the ratio of girls to boys in primary, secondary, and tertiary education; the ratio of literate women to men in the 15-to 24-year-old age group; the share of women in wage employment in the non-agricultural sector; and the proportion of seats held by women in national parliaments (UNDP, 2008). This seems to imply that education, literacy, employment, and political participation are the essential factors to the achievement of gender equality and women empowerment (Sweetman and Oxfam, 2005, 13). However, according to Bourguignon et al (2005), all of these indicators, on a deeper level, reduce to only one: education (Bourguignon et al, 2005, 253).

Recommendations of the task force

To achieve the third MDG, it has been suggested by the UN Millennium Project Task Force on Education and Gender Equality that national governments should expand their targets under gender equality. Recommended targets are: ensuring universal access to health services, eliminate discrimination in access to assets and employment, providing a 30% share of seats for women in national parliaments, and reducing by half the lifetime prevalence of violence against women (Grown et al, 2005, 125). The task force also suggests that national governments include additional indicators to monitor progress towards the third MDG. Their recommendations include completion rates for primary and secondary school; economic indicators such as gender gaps in earnings, sex-disaggregated unemployment rates and occupational segregation by sex; and prevalence rates for domestic violence in the past year (UNDP, 2008). Moreover, the report recommends the involvement of women’s groups and gender experts in consultations on all goals (Grown et al, 2005). Four key elements must underlie any institutional reform such as gender equality and they are access to information, encouraging participation; insisting on accountability at the political, administrative, and social levels, and developing local organizational capacity (Narayan-Parker and Narayan, 2002, xx).

My Opinion

I agree with the recommendations of the task force. Entry into schools is not a sufficient criterion for measuring literacy levels. Only when completion data are included, literacy rates can be studied accurately. Moreover, educational goals alone are not enough for the empowerment of women. Women need to become economically self-dependent and this can be done only through employment and ending discrimination in the workplace. Moreover, women can be considered truly empowered only when they are no longer victims of domestic abuse. Thus, the strategic focus should include career creation for women of all age groups and educational attainments. Skill-oriented training would be a way of empowering women.

Conclusion

The fact that gender equality is part of the global agenda for millennium development is a step forward and offers new opportunities for the empowerment of women. Although it is quite obvious already that most of the Millennium Development Goals are unlikely to be reached within their specified time-frames they provide a framework for moving towards them, and also to analyze the barriers to achieving gender equality and empowerment of women. Moreover, they also serve to hold various global agencies and governments accountable. The third Millennium Development Goal may currently be a distant dream, but as long as the world keeps moving along the strategic plans envisioned through this project, there is the possibility that this dream may come true very soon.

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