The Payoff From Women's Rights

Isobel Coleman

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2004

Summary:  Backing women's rights in developing countries isn't just good ethics; it's also sound economics. Growth and living standards get a dramatic boost when women are given just a bit more education, political clout, and economic opportunity. So the United States should aggressively promote women's rights abroad. And by couching its case in economic terms, it might even overcome the resistance of conservative Muslim countries that have long balked at gender equality.

Isobel Coleman is a Senior Fellow on U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.

ONE AT A TIME

Given the importance of women to economic and political development, it is no surprise that they are on the front line of modernization efforts around the world. But empowering women is rarely easy: it produces tensions everywhere, because it often collides with the twin powers of culture and religion.

Today, much scrutiny is given to the impact of Islam on women, often as evidence of a deep cultural rift between the West and conservative Muslim societies. But the real cultural rift may be within the Muslim world: between highly traditional rural populations and their more modernized urban compatriots or between religious fundamentalists and more moderate interpreters of Islam. Such tensions can be felt in countries ranging from Nigeria to Indonesia, but nowhere are they starker than in the Middle East.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, may be the best-known leader to have pushed his country into modernity by transforming the role of women in society. After the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924, Atatürk promoted an aggressive program of secularization, replacing sharia with European constitutional law, prohibiting traditional Muslim dress, abolishing religious schools, and turning education into a state monopoly. Believing that women are intrinsically important to society, he launched many reforms to give them equal rights and more opportunities. A new civil code abolished polygamy and recognized the rights of women to inherit, divorce, and get custody of their children. Segregation in education was ended, and women were given full political rights. By the mid-1930s, Turkey had 13 female judges and 18 female parliamentarians. It was the first country in the world to appoint a female justice to its highest court, and in the mid-1990s, a woman was elected prime minister.

Similarly, when Tunisia won its independence in 1956, President Habib Bourguiba adopted an authoritarian, top-down approach to empower women as part of broader efforts to modernize the country. In his first year, he adopted a revolutionary Code of Personal Status that greatly enhanced women's rights: it banned polygamy, required a girl's consent for marriage, raised the minimum marriage age to 17, and allowed women to request divorce. At the time, these were progressive measures not only for Tunisia, but also for the world. And they stood in especially stark contrast to the laws then in force in Morocco, which gained independence from France at the same time but adopted a highly restrictive personal status law (moudawana) that institutionalized many conservative constraints on women.

Tunisia's enlightened policies toward women have contributed to its markedly superior record on developing human capital and economic growth. Today, the country's overall literacy rate is 70 percent (80 percent for men and 60 percent for women), compared to only 48 percent in Morocco (60 percent for men and 35 percent for women). Tunisia's better-educated work force has helped the country attract more foreign direct investment. And tens of thousands of Tunisian women have brought their families into the middle class by working in export-oriented light manufacturing and foreign service centers. Not surprisingly, Tunisia's population growth rate has been notably lower than Morocco's, which accounts in part for its stronger gains in per capita income.

The aggressive promotion of women's rights has not come without a significant backlash. Because the notion of female empowerment is often strongly associated with secularism and Western values, it has generated widespread resistance in certain societies, among both men and women. To appeal to religious conservatives, leaders throughout the Arab world have long given them significant influence over women, usually by letting them oversee family law and personal status codes. But now that the importance of women to economic and political development is becoming increasingly clear, several young, Western-educated reformist leaders -- King Mohamed VI of Morocco, King Abdullah of Jordan, and Sheik Hamad of Qatar -- are reclaiming control over these areas. These leaders are engaged in the delicate exercise of pushing women forward without alienating their still highly conservative constituencies. Their efforts were boosted by the groundbreaking "Arab Human Development Report 2002," which attributed the Arab world's economic and political stagnation in part to gender inequality.

Women in Morocco have made some remarkable advances in recent years. In the mid-1990s, with the support of the World Bank, Morocco launched a program promoting women's participation in development by increasing girls' education, health care for mothers and their children, and economic and political opportunities for women. It guaranteed that women would get 10 percent of the seats in the lower house of parliament in the 2002 elections. This quota helped raise the number of female representatives from 2 to 35 -- a notable achievement in the Arab world, which has the lowest percentage of women parliamentarians anywhere (about 3 percent). Several international organizations, including the National Democratic Institute and the UN Development Fund for Women, helped train the female candidates.

Women's groups have also been encouraged to play a more active role in Moroccan politics. In recent years, they have lobbied hard to reform the moudawana, and despite vehement opposition from fundamentalists, Mohammed VI established a "royal consultative committee" to assist their efforts. In January, the Moroccan parliament enacted one of the most progressive women's rights laws in the region, allowing women to marry without their father's consent, initiate divorce, and share with their husbands responsibility over family matters. The minimum marriage age was raised from 15 to 18, and the practice of polygamy severely restricted.