Staff post by Milad Pournik

The Women’s Foreign Policy Group (WFPG) hosted an event entitled Why Measuring Gender Equality is a Foreign Policy Issue in Washington DC on October 5. The event featured two speakers: Sarah Iqbal of the Women, Business and the Law (WBL) project of the World Bank and Andria Hayes-Birchler, Development Policy Officer at the Millennium Challenge Corporation.

Iqbal started by explaining that the WBL project had grown out of the World Bank’s Doing Business  initiative after realization that it was important to understand the gendered dimensions of business environments worldwide. The WBL primarily gathers data through surveys completed by local lawyers in 141 countries. In its most recent WBL report, the World Bank found that only 38 out of 141 countries have full gender equality in the 45 key areas.  The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is the most unequal with all 14 countries having at least 10 legal differentiations. Iqbal also mentioned the strong correlation between the WBL and other measures such as the Global Gender Gap Index, the Women’s Economic Opportunity Index, and the Social Institutions and Gender Index.  Finally, Iqbal reported that the WBL would start looking at the issue of sexual violence in the workplace in subsequent reports.

(more…)

Guest post by Ariana Rabindranath

On March 5, 2012, the World Bank hosted an event to underscore the critical role that the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) has played in promoting women’s rights in developing countries. The event was co-sponsored by the Nordic Trust Fund, The Leadership Conference Education Fund, and the United Nations Foundation.

In her opening remarks, Melanne Verveer, Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues in the U.S. State Department, lauded the use of CEDAW to provide legitimacy to women’s rights activists and specifically for use as a lobbying tool for equal rights in a constitution: “Today we have established a red line… Those who emerge from conflict must abide by a constitution and it must include equal rights for women.” CEDAW has provided protection from those who do not support women’s rights.

Verveer then relayed a conversation she had with an Afghan official opposed to a law against violence against women. When Verveer reminded the man that his government had ratified CEDAW, his response was, “I keep telling them not to ratify those international treaties.”

Sima Samar, Chairperson of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and Former Minister of Women’s Affairs in Afghanistan, was the keynote speaker. She reviewed obstacles to women’s equality including women’s rights being “a political football” because no one is willing to take them on; lack of educational opportunities for women; negative religious interpretation of women’s rights; unequal value for women’s work; lack of access to basic social services; and culture of impunity for sexual violence. (more…)