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.

Although that accomplishment is significant, it was no more than a fragile first step. For Afghan women to benefit from the quota -- or from any political or economic opportunity -- they will need to become much better educated. Female literacy (defined as the ability to read a newspaper and write a letter) is well below 20 percent in Afghanistan. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has stated that Afghan girls' education is one of its priorities, and already more girls attend school than ever before in the country's history. But USAID has committed only $100 million to all education initiatives in Afghanistan over the next two years. That is grossly insufficient funding for the most pressing educational need of Afghan girls -- the training of female teachers -- especially since a large part of it is earmarked for school construction.

Women's progress since the fall of the Taliban has been significant, but it may be short-lived. Several of the powerful warlords who effectively control large swaths of the country fiercely oppose women's rights. Their militias have burned down girls' schools and pressured village leaders to prevent women from registering to vote in upcoming elections. And the United States supports these leaders, tacitly and explicitly, using their help in the hunt for terrorists. This marriage of convenience threatens Washington's policy of advancing women's rights, which will have to be pursued for another generation before the status of Afghan women improves substantially.

Washington has also compromised on women's issues in Iraq. On the one hand, it has placed women's rights high on its reconstruction agenda: U.S. officials meet frequently with female Iraqi leaders, emphasize the importance of women's rights, and have channeled several million dollars to local women's groups. (In March, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced the Iraqi Women Democracy Initiative, which earmarks $10 million for leadership, political advocacy, and media training for women.) On the other hand, Washington has bowed to pressure from Shia leaders, backing down from appointing several female judges and designating only three women to the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) and none to the 24-member Constitutional Committee.

The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) has also vacillated on the sensitive issue of sharia. Over the past year, many Iraqis have expressed deep concern that the rights women enjoyed under Saddam Hussein's secular Baathist regime would be significantly eroded if the new government adopted sharia wholesale. Concerns intensified in December when the IGC canceled Iraq's relatively liberal Personal Status Law, placing several aspects of family law, such as marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance, under the control of religious authorities. (Critics have argued that the move proves the CPA should have appointed more women to the IGC.) During deliberations on the interim constitution, Iraqi women organized protests and U.S. civilian administrator Paul Bremer said he would veto any draft that tried to impose a rigid version of sharia on Iraq. As a compromise, the interim constitution states that Islam will be an important source of future legislation but not the only one, as Shia leaders demanded. How strenuously the United States will continue to push this issue is unclear and still a cause for deep concern to many Iraqis.

The U.S. experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq show that advancing women's rights is a complicated and delicate task, particularly in Muslim societies. But just as the United States promoted human rights even when doing so conflicted with its other strategic objectives (arms control in the Soviet Union or economic relations with China), it should now wholeheartedly promote women's rights. Washington should make sure its policy on women's rights is consistent, it should generously fund the projects it undertakes, and, where necessary, it should condition its aid to developing countries on their efforts to close gender gaps.

For the sake of consistency and credibility, the United States must promote international efforts intended to advance the role of women worldwide. It should lead the implementation of UN Resolution 1325, unanimously passed by the General Assembly in 2000, which committed the UN to giving women a greater role in peacekeeping and postconflict transitions. More important, the United States should finally endorse the 1981 Convention to Eliminate Discrimination Against Women, the only global treaty that deals exclusively with the rights of women, which 175 countries, including every industrialized democracy but the United States, have ratified. U.S. critics of the treaty have called it "antifamily," even though nothing in it contradicts traditional family values. They have also argued that the United States does not need it, since U.S. laws go well beyond what it recommends. So why not ratify it? By failing to support the agreement, Washington undermines its professed commitment to women's rights and exposes itself to charges of hypocrisy.

The United States should also dramatically increase funding to improve the status of women in regions where gender gaps are widest and assistance is most needed: the Middle East, southern Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. Given the demonstrated high returns on investments in girls' education, the United States should, as its top development priority, work to eliminate gender gaps in primary education (USAID support for basic education is roughly $250 million). Likewise, it should expand support for microfinancing beyond its current level of roughly $200 million. Women's health and family planning deserve more funding too, particularly in countries such as Afghanistan where maternal mortality rates are alarmingly high. Adequate primary, maternal, and reproductive health care is critical to women's empowerment, especially in areas with high rates of adolescent marriage. (In those countries, the Bush administration's emphasis on abstinence is unrealistic.) Finally, the United States should use the Middle East Partnership Initiative, a $150 million program to advance democracy in the Middle East, which promotes programs for female literacy and health, as well as business and political training, as a model for more activist, pro-women policies in other parts of the world.

With the Millennium Challenge Account, the United States is now undertaking the largest expansion of foreign development aid in more than a generation. It should seize this opportunity to leverage its aid for the benefit of women's rights, by incorporating specific gender measures into the criteria that determine eligibility for funds. None of the 16 current criteria specifically takes account of women's status, but these could easily be adjusted. A country's maternal mortality ratio and its female primary school completion rate are both good indicators of gender equality there.

Similarly, the United States could promote respect for women's rights by making adherence to them a more explicit condition for U.S. military and economic aid. The State Department should be tasked with writing country reports tracking worldwide progress on key gender measures such as girls' literacy, maternal health, gender ratios, and political participation, much as it already does on human rights. Funding data collection on gender disparities is also important. Such information is lacking in many countries, and improving it could, by itself, help close gender gaps resulting from neglect.

"The worldwide advancement of women's issues is not only in keeping with the deeply held values of the American people," Powell has said, "it is strongly in our national interest as well." The United States has advocated women's rights as a moral imperative or as a way to promote democracy. In so doing, it might have compounded the difficulty of its task, by irking conservative religious forces or the authoritarian regimes it otherwise supports. But now Washington can also make an economic case for women's rights, which may be more acceptable to traditionalists. Promoting women's rights because they spur development and economic growth is a powerful way for the United States to advance its foreign policy in the future while minimizing the ideological debates that have frustrated it in the past.