Tipping points for women

Germany elected its first female chancellor last year, and Norway has
started a bold experiment to require the top 500 private companies to have
40 percent of their governing boards be women over the next two years.
This quota system, designed to break a corporate “glass ceiling,” is being
tried in a Nordic country where 16 percent of company directors are
already women, and a third of parliamentary members and about half of the
cabinet are female.

But in Britain, which saw a powerful female prime minister during the
1980s, a report by the nation’s Equal Opportunities Commission says gender
equality in public life is “decades away.” Only about 10 percent of senior
positions in large companies and law enforcement are held by women, while
the pace for women in Parliament is so slow that equality may take a
couple centuries. About 20 percent of MPs are women. Progress for women in
US politics has been similarly slow.

In Britain, as in America, there’s a recognition that discrimination
plays less of a role in women’s progress in public life as more women tip
the balance in favor of motherhood over careers in what’s called “choice
feminism.” These “choices,” however, are often dictated by the high cost
of day care or its unavailability.

In Japan, workplace discrimination against women still remains strong,
despite a 1985 law against it. But now that nation, with its low birth
rate, faces a labor shortage as it ages rapidly, and the government is
pushing new measures to encourage mothers to return to work after
childbirth (more than two-thirds don’t). The new measures would grant more
work flexibility for such returning workers, improve day care, and support
women entrepreneurs. (Japan is also moving to allow a female monarch
because no male heir to the throne has been born for 40 years.)

The Arab world has only recently begun to recognize the untapped
potential of women as leaders. Iraq’s new Constitution required every
third candidate in the recent election to be a woman and that its
parliament be 25 percent female. But the charter also gives a primary role
to Islam in writing new laws and the right for religious sects to run
“family courts” deciding such issues as child custody.

By many measures, from politics to poverty, women still have a long way
to go toward equality and upliftment. The world last put a big spotlight
on women’s progress at the 1995 UN Fourth World Conference on Women in
China. More than a decade later, that progress shows up in unexpected
places, such as the elections in Liberia and Chile. Those elections are
worth celebrating, but they should also refocus efforts in areas where
women aren’t breaking through traditional
barriers.