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Chennai | |
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Chinese women lag only in politics
BEIJING: Despite remarkable progress in improving the status of women in social and economic terms, China lags the rest of Asia in empowering women politically, a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) study has found.
But some six decades after Mao Zedong famously declared “women hold up half the sky”, women in China fare far better overall than their counterparts in India and the rest of the Asia-Pacific on almost every economic indicator, according to the report.
Women's participation in the labour force in China is now 70 per cent, far higher than the 35 per cent in South Asia and the global average of 53 per cent. Life expectancy has risen to 75 years, while female literacy rates are more than double India's.
“China stands out in its achievements and efforts to ensure gender equality, and China is ahead of most East Asian countries,” says Abhimanyu Singh, chair of the U.N. Theme Group on Gender in China, and UNESCO's representative in Beijing.
The UNDP's study on gender equality, released on the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day, has found much progress in China's historically-stratified society in terms of women's access to education, employment and healthcare.
In 1949, when the People's Republic of China was established, female illiteracy was rampant, maternal mortality rates were high, and social prejudices were widespread. But the Communist Party's sweeping political reforms, while often enacted at high costs to life and freedom, left one important legacy.
“The Communist government promoted the idea that men and women are equal, and one way was encouraging women to enter into the workforce in the 1950s,” says Julie Broussard, the China programme manager for the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM). The economic reforms and “opening up” of 1978 further accelerated the process.
“China was trying so hard to keep its economy growing that in some ways it was tapping every resource it could,” said Ms. Broussard. “Young rural girls entering into factories were a huge driving force in fuelling China's boom.”
The high rate of participation of women in the labour force is seen by women's rights groups as a significant factor in enabling women's empowerment.
But rights activists are concerned by the one area where China fares worse than the rest of Asia — in empowering women politically. Between the first convening of China's legislature, the National People's Congress, in 1954 and its fourth in 1975, the percentage of women representatives went from 12 per cent to 23 per cent. But it has since stagnated at around 21 per cent. Only 37 of the ruling Communist Party's 371-member Central Committee, its highest body, are women.
Another concern is a growing imbalance in sex ratios. Male-female sex ratios in China are among the highest in Asia, with a strong traditional preference for sons leading to sex-selective abortions and infanticide — a trend exacerbated by the one-child policy. There are 122.9 boys to every 100 girls at birth in rural China, far higher than the global average.
“In employment, education, political participation, health and marriage, Chinese women still face many challenges,” says Meng Xiaosi, vice president of the All China Women's Federation. “Legal equality is still a long way from factual equality.”
