Padaviya

But globally, Beijing has not translated into major gains for ordinary working women, especially in the developing world. Some activists say there has even been a regression of women’s rights.

The Beijing Platform set an important benchmark for achieving gender equality in 12 critical areas, including health, education, employment and political participation.

There’s been progress in some areas: more girls now attend school, especially at the primary level, and women are more likely to run businesses and be given loans.

But women are still disproportionately poor and illiterate. For example, two thirds of adults who can’t read are women, more than half a million women die in childbirth every year, and 70% experience some form of violence in their lifetimes.

Why has progress been so uneven? One reason, says the former Irish President Mary Robinson, is that too often the agenda is driven by politicians and donors rather than women on the ground.

lora Terah brought pieces of her homeland with her when she fled Kenya for the safer shores of Canada.

Waking in the morning in snow-bound Montreal, she can still see in her mind the sunshine and blue skies of Meru, the district in eastern Kenya where she was a parliamentary candidate in 2007.

She can still hear the voice of the senior police administrator who directed the beating - bone by broken bone - that was supposed to dissuade her from running for office.

And she bears within her broken heart the memory of her beloved son, murdered in Nairobi at age 19, his death the result, she is sure, of her political activity.

Few countries in the world offer women a level political playing field, but even against this dismal backdrop, Kenya’s treatment of women reaches a new low.

“Women in Kenya are supposed to be seen and not heard,” said Terah in a recent interview in Montreal.

OTTAWA – It just doesn’t pay to be a working woman in Canada today, according to a new report released by the Canadian Labour Congress. In fact, for today’s younger, more educated working woman, it pays a lot less than it did just ten years ago.

“Canada’s economy has a problem – it pays women less than men. It pays women less even when we are just as skilled, just as educated and work just as long. It leaves us with less to live on when our working years are over and it rewards us less when we invest in higher education or put career ahead of family. The bottom line is women are still not equal, not even close, when it comes to the bottom line,” says Barbara Byers, Executive Vice-President of the Canadian Labour Congress.

• In France, one woman is killed every three days in domestic violence, according to the interior ministry. A national police study in 2008 revealed that 156 women were murdered by their partner or ex-partner, while 27 men were killed in comparable circumstances. Nine children were murdered by their fathers. The deaths represent 16 percent of the national total of homicides.

• Every minute on average in Britain the police receive a call from a member of the public requesting assistance with domestic abuse. Two women are murdered every week in England and Wales at the hands of their partners or ex-partners, according to data released by the Sussex police, and included in the latest report of Women against Violence in Europe (WAVE), a European network of women’s shelters.

• In Italy, violence against women is rising. According to the latest report by the National Statistics Institute, ISTAT, 6.7 million women are estimated to have been victims of physical or sexual violence during their lifetime, out of a population of 60.3 million.

Last week, a firestorm erupted in the birth and reproductive justice advocacy world over a statement generated by the NIH Vaginal Birth After Cesarean (VBAC) Consensus Development panel implying that in some circumstances a pregnant woman cannot refuse cesarean surgery. (Audio files can be found here, videocast here and commentary here, here, and here). Panelist Laurence McCullough, the chair in Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Baylor University College of Medicine, spoke for the panel during the public comment session and in a press briefing, taking the position that a physician has an independent obligation to protect a fetus, which, it is claimed, is not dispensed by a laboring woman’s refusal to consent. The panelists’ comments indicated that a conclusion regarding the ethical question was beyond their scope, yet stated to the press and to the audience that the body of law and ethics that protects the right to refuse surgery was not written for, and may not include pregnant patients.

Are women who are pregnant simply a different form of person with a different set of rights?

The position taken by the consensus panel directly contradicts the thoughtful and comprehensive presentation given 24 hours earlier by Dr. Anne Lyerly of Duke University, the invited expert speaker on the ethics of vaginal birth after cesarean. Dr. Lyerly reminded the panel of “a lesson that we need to keep learning but should know by now.”