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United Nations: U.S. Is Failing Women

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(Gary Cameron/Reuters)

MOVING BACKWARD

From health care to wages, America is failing women on every level, according to a new report.

Earlier this month, human rights experts from the United Nations visited a backwards country where women are paid significantly less than men, where women are drastically underrepresented in the national legislature, where the percentages of women living in poverty and dying during childbirth are rising, where pregnant women in prisons are shackled during childbirth, and where women face intimidation and harassment while trying to access health care.

When they returned from their trip, they said they were “shocked” by what they found and chided the nation for being one of just seven—including Iran, Somalia, and Sudan—that hasn’t yet ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).

You’ll be forgiven if you haven’t heard of this place before. It’s an obscure nation called the United States of America.

On December 11th, a UN working group on legal discrimination against women concluded its ten-day tour of the United States, which included meetings in Washington D.C. and visits to Alabama, Oregon and Texas. Between them, the experts in the working group, led by Eleonora Zielinska of Poland, have decades of experience in law, public policy, diplomacy, academia, and government.

What they found, essentially, was that the U.S. hypocritically fails to measure up to the very standards that it sets for other countries when it comes to women’s human rights.

“The United States, which is a leading state in formulating international human rights standards, is allowing its women to lag behind international human rights standards,” the group concluded in a statement, released to the press in advance of a full report coming in June 2016.

Their statement is an eye-opening description of the country from an outsider’s perspective that may recall that time you read “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema” in grade school: When the U.S. is de-centered, it seems woefully unadvanced relative to its wealth.

“We acknowledge the United States’ commitment to liberty, so well represented by the Statue of Liberty which symbolizes both womanhood and freedom,” the statement began. The praise mostly stopped there.

Despite currently having “the highest level of legislative representation ever achieved by women” in the country, the U.S. still ranks at a mere 72 in the world in terms of the percentage of female lawmakers. With women holding just 19.4 percent of congressional seats, the U.S. falls well below Rwanda, Mexico, Uganda, Pakistan, and most developed nations.

The group also concluded that women play an essential role in driving the growth of the U.S. economy but suffer disproportionately from the global recession’s aftereffects and from persistent income inequality, with a wage gap of 21 percent. On top of these overarching disparities, non-white women, pregnant women, and new mothers face even more challenges in employment.

“[W]e are shocked by the lack of mandatory standards for workplace accommodation for pregnant women, post-natal mothers and persons with care responsibilities, which are required in international human rights law,” the experts noted.

Indeed, the U.S. consistently falls at or near the bottom of international parental leave rankings because it requires no paid leave, only 12 weeks of unpaid time off.

The working group was also discouraged by the fact that the percentage of women living in poverty had increased over the last decade from 12.1 to 14.5 percent, and that the maternal mortality rate increased by 136 percent from 1990 to 2013. Both of these figures vary by ethnicity: non-white women earn less than white women and African-American women die during childbirth at three to four times the rate of white women.

The statement listed off even more human rights violations and shortcomings in the United States: contraception exemptions in insurance plans courtesy of the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, the criminalization of women in prostitution, a lack of “adequate and quality sex education” with an inordinate focus on abstinence, and widespread discrimination against immigrant women.

What they found, essentially, was that the U.S. hypocritically fails to measure up to the very standards that it sets for other countries when it comes to women’s human rights.

“While all women are the victims of these missing rights, women who are poor, belong to Native American, Afro-American and Hispanic ethnic minorities, migrant women, LBTQ women, women with disabilities and older women are disparately vulnerable,” they concluded.

But the experts were especially concerned by the current state of reproductive rights in the United States. They visited abortion clinics in Texas and Alabama and witnessed firsthand that “many of the clinics work in conditions of constant threats, harassments and vandalizing.”

“Although women have a legal right to terminate a pregnancy under federal law, ever increasing barriers are being created to prevent their access to abortion procedures,” they observed.

The late November shooting of a police officer and two civilians at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood center took place “just before the start of [their] visit,” they said, and “once again demonstrated the extreme hostility and danger faced by family planning providers and patients.”

“We urge the authorities to combat the stigma attached to reproductive and sexual health care, which leads to violence, harassment and intimidation against those seeking or providing reproductive health care, and to investigate and prosecute violence or threats of violence,” they advised.

Above all, the working group urges the U.S. to finally ratify CEDAW. As Amnesty International notes, the U.S. currently has “the dubious distinction of being the only country in the Western Hemisphere and the only industrialized democracy that has not yet ratified this treaty,” first adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1979.

Ratifying CEDAW would require the U.S. to commit “to incorporate the principle of equality of men and women in their legal system.” The U.S. Senate has never voted on the treaty.

“We understand the complexity of federalism,” the working group noted, “but this cannot be regarded as a justification for failure to secure these rights.”

Published by Samantha Allen via The Daily Beast

Carly Fiorina said she’s been “called every b-word in the book” at the Republican debate

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Updated by  via VOX

Photo Source: The Daily Beast

Carly Fiorina said in her opening statement at the CNN Republican debate on Tuesday that she has been “called every b-word in the book.”

Fiorina clearly meant “bitch,” or perhaps “bossy” — in any case, a gendered insult. The comment, and indeed her entire opening statement, was heavily focused on the ways she has struggled to overcome specifically gender-based obstacles to get to the top.

In discussing her struggles and challenges, Fiorina led off with very gendered ones: “I have been tested. I have beaten breast cancer. I have buried a child.”

Then she transitioned into her corporate and political ladder climbing: “I started as a secretary. I fought my way to the top of corporate America while being called every b-word in the book. I fought my way into this election.”

And later on in the debate, Fiorina paraphrased Margaret Thatcher: “If you want something talked about, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman.”

It’s likely that Fiorina is trying to set herself up as an opponent who could neutralize one of Hillary Clinton‘s big talking points — her potential status as first woman president of the United States. That could diffuse Clinton’s support from people who generally want to see a woman president; one report found donors who gave to both Clinton and Fiorina, despite their stark differences on policy.

Fiorina may scorn liberal identity politics, but she has had no problem with the word “feminism,” or with discussing the ways that being a woman presents unique challenges to her that men don’t have to deal with. She calls out sexism when she sees it used against her, like her ad pushing back against Donald Trump for making fun of her face. “A feminist is a woman who lives the life she chooses,” Fiorina has said. “A woman may choose to have five children and home-school them. She may choose to become a CEO, or run for President.”

But Fiorina’s feminism is a very individualistic, have-it-all, lean-in, corporate type of feminism — one where any woman can make it to the top if she just “fights” hard enough. One where talking about comprehensive access to reproductive health care is actually an insult to women because it supposedly reduces them to their body parts and makes them dependent on government. And one that doesn’t acknowledge the structural challenges, from implicit bias in the workplace to the impossible “choice” between family income and child care, that make living “the life she chooses” easier said than done for too many American women.