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.

Similarly, in Jordan, King Abdullah is improving the education of women and increasing their participation in the work force and in politics. The government has eliminated any gender gap in primary school enrollment, and girls now outnumber boys in secondary and tertiary education. Queen Rania, Abdullah's wife, has actively promoted microfinance initiatives, and under her patronage, in late 2003, Jordan hosted the region's first microfinance conference. The government has also implemented limited electoral quotas, reserving 6 out of 110 seats in parliament for women.

Nowhere, however, is women's reform more startling than in tiny Qatar, an otherwise highly conservative Wahhabi state. Sheik Hamad has launched a number of political reforms, including the country's first popular elections in 1999, in which both men and women were allowed to vote and run for office. Hamad and his wife, Sheika Mouza, have also encouraged educational reform. The government hired the Rand Corporation to advise on restructuring the country's educational system, and it launched the Education City Initiative, which has invited several American universities to set up local branches in Qatar (including the Virginia Commonwealth School of Arts and the Weill Cornell Medical College). Women now make up nearly 70 percent of the country's university students. Although Qatar's population is less than a million, the effects of its reforms are likely to ripple beyond its borders.

These reforms have not gone unnoticed in neighboring Saudi Arabia, for example, where religious conservatives still maintain strict control over women's access to public life. Saudi society is nearly completely segregated: in health care, education, and the work force. Women are treated as minors: they must have a male chaperon in public, they are not allowed to drive, and they need permission from their closest male relative to travel. The Saudi government has recently agreed to issue women identity cards, but only with the permission of a male guardian. The notorious mutaween (religious police) patrol malls to ensure that women are fully covered in public. In a tragic incident in Mecca in 2002, 15 schoolgirls were killed in a fire after mutaween allegedly forced them back inside the burning building because they were not appropriately covered.

But the Mecca fire prompted a national debate over religious extremism, after which control over the education of Saudi girls was transferred from religious authorities to the Ministry of Education. And that controversy helped revive long-standing calls for change. Female literacy in Saudi Arabia has risen from 2 percent in the mid-1960s, when universal female education was introduced (over vehement protest from the religious authorities), to more than 70 percent today. Women now account for nearly 60 percent of all university students, and they increasingly question the constraints on their lives. In January 2003, Saudi women signed a petition demanding that the government recognize their legal and civil rights. These efforts are beginning to pay off. The government, risking the wrath of religious conservatives, recently offered to let women take part in elections scheduled for later this year.

The demands of Saudi women may be helped along by new economic circumstances that are fueling the pressure for change. (A joke circulating around Riyadh says that the woman most sought after these days is the one with a job.) As GNP per capita has plunged from $25,000 in 1984 to roughly $8,500 today, more Saudis are wondering why half the country's human capital should be so severely handicapped. Indeed, a World Bank study on labor markets in the Middle East indicates that the increased participation of women in the work force can raise the average household income by as much as 25 percent without raising unemployment. So it is an encouraging sign that 10 percent of private Saudi businesses today are believed to be run by women.

Still, the Saudi debate over women's rights is often a proxy for difficult and dangerous debates over civil liberties, religious extremism, and human rights more generally, which are largely stifled. Talk of women's liberation encounters powerful resistance and recurring backlashes. Women played a major role in the recent Jeddah Economic Forum, which featured a keynote address by Lubna al Olayan, a prominent businesswoman, calling for greater economic and political rights for women. But soon after the conference, Saudi Arabia's grand mufti, or highest religious authority, issued a fatwa denouncing the public role of women. (It could not have helped that al Olayan also appeared on the front page of several leading Saudi newspapers with her head uncovered.)

Fundamentalists draw such a close link between women's empowerment and Western decadence that reformists such as Crown Prince Abdullah must be exceedingly careful when they endorse the former not to appear to be condoning the latter. For now, the role of women continues to be a line in the sand between those who want to modernize the country and those who seek to impose a harsh, medieval version of Islam in the kingdom.

A FAIRER FUTURE

The Bush administration appears to recognize the importance of women to development. Women's rights have been a prominent element of its nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq and a central motif of its project to promote democracy in the Middle East. U.S. policymakers have been instrumental in pushing for women's rights in the new constitutions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Their influence has helped bridge deep cultural rifts in both countries, and it was critical in securing a 25 percent electoral quota for women there.