Cialis review by women

KEY TRENDS

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According to Progress for Children: A Report Card on Adolescents (UNICEF), Number 10, April, 2012,
http://www.unicef.org/media/files/PFC2012_A_report_card_on_adolescents.pdf: 

•    Some 1.2 billion adolescents (10−19 years old) presently constitute 18 per cent of the world’s population. More than half of all adolescents live in Asia. In absolute numbers, India is home to more adolescents–around 243 million–than any other country. It is followed by China, with around 200 million adolescents.

•    Every year, globally, 1.4 million adolescents die from road traffic injuries, complications of childbirth, suicide, violence, AIDS and other causes.

•    Adolescent aged 10-19 constituted 20 percent of Indian population in 2010.

•    22 percent of Indian women aged 20-24 gave birth before age 18 during 2000-2010.

•    Nearly 47 per cent of adolescent girls aged 15–19 in India are underweight, with a body mass index of less than 18.5.

•    In India, more than half of girls aged 15–19 are anaemic. 39 percent of Indian adolescent girls are mildly anaemic, 15 percent are moderately anaemic and 2 percent are severely anaemic.

•    88 percent of male and 72 percent of female adolescents (aged 15-19) in India had media exposure at least once a week during 2000-2010.

•    Bangladesh, India and Nigeria alone account for one in every three of the world’s adolescent births.

•    In India, less than 30 per cent of mothers under 20 years old in the poorest households are assisted during delivery by a skilled birth attendant, compared to 90 per cent of young mothers in the richest households.

•    Young women in the poorest households are seven times more likely to give birth before age 18 than young women from the richest households in India.

•    57 percent of adolescent Indian boys (15-19 years) justified wife-beating by husbands as compared to 53 percent female adolescents during 2002-2010.

•    8 percent of female adolescents (aged 15-19) in India had sex before age 15 during 2005-2010 as compared to 3 percent of male adolescents.

•    19 percent of female adolescents (aged 15-19) in India had comprehensive knowledge of HIV during 2005-2010 as compared to 35 percent male adolescents.

•    30 percent of Indian female adolescents (aged 15-19) were either married or in union during 2000-2010 as compared to 5 percent male adolescents.

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A survey based study, called “The Economic Rights & Entitlements of Separated and Divorced Women India,” was conducted by a team of researchers, women’s rights activists and lawyers, for the Economic Research Foundation of India between October 2008 and September 2009 and will be published in 2012. It surveyed 405 Indian women who were either separated or divorced or deserted. The women were randomly selected from cities, towns and villages in north, east, south and west of India in an attempt to understand what happens to women when marriages fail. The survey looks at the economic and financial status of these women and seeks to capture the stark reality of their lives. It seeks to record their experiences with the police and the Courts.

Most of the surveyees were Hindus (75%) followed by Muslims (19%) and the rest belonged to other religious communities. A sizeable 42% belonged to the SC/ ST and OBC sections of our society. Education levels varied from 17.1% who had no formal education to 51.85% with different levels of schooling, ranging from primary to higher secondary. Surprisingly, 29.7% were graduates (10+2+3 years of education) and post-graduates. Thus though 29.7% of the surveyees were educated up to the graduate level or above, only 14.1% of the SC/ST surveyees had studied beyond school.

Key findings of the study titled: The Economic Rights & Entitlements of Separated and Divorced Women India (2012),

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KGuHtWAK6udX6Dq1pn9DkzKR0awOqv5vwNTixHu9TAE/edit?pli=1: 

• In most parts of the country except the southern region, the majority of separated/divorced women (more than sixty percent) were aged between 23-32 years, i.e. they were separated/ divorced in their twenties or early thirties. Whereas in the Southern region most women (64%) surveyed were 28-42 years of age. 

• Data analysis from a caste perspective shows that more than 60% of the SC/ ST (Scheduled Tribes) and Other Backward Class (OBC) surveyees were divorced/ separated when they were younger than 32 years of age. About 50% of these surveyees from general category were separated/ divorced at or below the age of 32 years. 

• Majority live at the mercy of their husbands during the subsistence of marriage and post-marriage depend perforce on their parents, brothers, etc. Despite maintenance provisions most women are financially dependent on their natal families and 63% live with natal families, usually parents. 

• Among general and OBCs this data is similar except that in SC/ST category where 71.4% of the surveyees from this category live with their natal family post separation. The miserable financial status of separated and divorced women is evident from the fact that even after separation 41.5% had no income and 27.4% earned less than Rs. 2000 per month.

• Although 58.5% of the women surveyed were able to work outside their homes and earn something, their earnings were often too low for them to survive independently. Only 14% of the surveyees were able to earn more than Rs. 6000 per month. In the Southern region more separated/divorced women were working and earning (66%); whereas, in the Northern region this percentage was the lowest i.e. about 39%. 

• Only 2.7% of the women were in a better occupation like being a manager, engineer, professional and consultant, etc and 4.9% of the surveyees were advocates, teachers or doctors. 15.6% of our surveyees were working either as domestic workers or were labourers, 23% of the women were in service or employed. In contrast just 1% of the husbands were labourers, 11% were professionals like managers, and 5% were advocates, teachers or doctors. About 8% of surveyees did not know the current occupation of their spouses. 

• Remarriage is extremely rare. The fact that 85.6% of the surveyees had children living with them compounded their troubles. As many as 429 (85.6%) out of 501 children were living with their mother while the rest were with their fathers (7%) and others. 

• Most of the spouses of the surveyees were in the higher income group with over 55% of them earning Rs10, 000 and above. In 32% of the cases where the surveyees’ incomes were less than Rs. 1,000 per month the income of the male spouses was more than Rs. 10,000 per month. The contrast is stark. Separation/divorce clearly spells financial disaster for women and children but leaves the separated/divorced male with more income to spend on himself alone. 87.9% of the surveyees who knew about their male spouses’ lifestyles said that they lived better than they had earlier or maintained the same lifestyle.

• A total of 516 cases were filed by 326 surveyees. Multiple cases were filed by some women, mostly (213) asking for maintenance.  Thus the overwhelming need of our surveyees was for financial support.  The second largest number of cases (94) was for harassment for Dowry and for recovery of Dowry.

• The survey highlights the startling reality that 83% of the surveyees were separated due to cruelty or domestic violence in their marital homes. The violence took place even though 87.92% of our surveyees were living in extended families. 13.5% of the surveyees reported that they had been deserted by their husbands. 

• 84.5% of the Hindu surveyees and 79.2% of the Muslim surveyees reported that they had been subjected to cruelty/ domestic violence of various kinds. SC/ST surveyees reported that they had to face mental violence in almost all of the cases, whereas in about 90% of the OBC cases the surveyees had faced mental violence.

• Extra-marital affair was a reason for cruelty in about 35% of the cases among SC/ST category, whereas other reasons (30.8%) as well as the dowry related issues (28.8%) were also significant causes for cruelty. 

• In over 69% of the 309 reported cases the dowry and Stridhan was in the possession of the male spouse and in-laws and in 30% cases it is with the surveyees. In quite a few cases it had been sold off by the in-laws/ spouse. Only 40.1% of the 367 surveyees went to the Police for recovery of dowry, Stridhan or gift items but their experience was not positive.

• The surveyees gave examples to show how marriage had affected their career opportunities as they could not work after marriage or work in a very limited way. Over half i.e. 62.7% in all of the cases, and in 75.6% from the North, 67.5% from the South, 59.3% from the East and 54.9% from the West said that they had suffered a loss of earning capacity.

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According to the report titled: Women and Men in India 2011, 13th issue, MoSPI, http://mospi.nic.in/Mospi_New/upload/women_men_2011_31oct11.pdf: 

• The average Indian woman bears her first child before she is 22 years old, and has little control over her own fertility and reproductive health. In rural India, almost 60 per cent of girls are married before they are 18. Nearly 60 per cent of married girls bear children before they are 19. Almost one third of all babies are born with low birth weight.  

• An increasing trend in mean age at marriage is observed for females in India. It has gone up from 19.8 years in 2000 to 20.7 years in 2008.

• The sex-ratio (number of women per 1000 men) was 933 in 2001 and is projected to be 932 in 2010.

• Preference for son varies according to social groups and regions in India. 20% men and 22.3% women prefer to have more sons than daughters. (NFHS-III, 2005-06).

• The Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is 2.6 for the year 2008, being 2.9 in the rural areas and 2.0 in the urban areas.

• The mortality rate among females across all ages is 6.8 and that among males is 8.0 for the year 2008. The female mortality rate in the age‐group 0‐4 years has declined to 16.1 in 2008 from 20.6 in 2000.

• Out of 150.18 million households in the rural areas in 2004-05, 16.67 million are Female Headed Households (11.10%). In the urban sector, out of the total of 56.97 million households, 4.85 million are Female Headed (10.9%).

• The percentage of never married females and married females across all the age-groups is 43.9 and 47.9, respectively, in 2008. The Widowed/ Divorced or Separated constitute 8.0% of the population in 2008.

• The migration percentage in different streams for females as per the Census 2001 is: rural to rural- 71%; rural to urban- 13.6%; urban to urban- 9.7% and urban to rural- 5.6%. The migration among females is maximum due to marriage (64.9%). Among the males, the important cause of migration is employment (37.6%).

• Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) has been decreasing over the years. The IMR for females in India is 55 compared to 52 for males in 2008.

• Life Expectancy at Birth (LEB) has increased more among women compared to men. It is observed that in 2002-06 LEB for males was 62.6 years compared to 64.2 years for females.

• 56%  of the women in the age group 15-19 are anaemic  The share of deliveries in hospitals, maternity/ nursing homes, health centers, etc. is 40.8% while the deliveries assisted by doctors, trained ‘dais’, trained midwives, trained nurses, etc. constitute another 48.8% (NFHS-III, 2005-06). 

• Over 99% of married women know about any of the methods of contraception. The awareness about the female sterilization is very high in both urban and rural areas. The rural women are found to be less aware about the traditional methods (56.5%), though it has increased significantly over the last 7‐8 year (NFHS-III, 2005-06).

• Women also lead a differential life style. 32% women in India drink alcohol, 57% chew paan masala and 33% women smoke currently (NFHS-III, 2005-06).

• Among the crimes committed against women in 2008, torture shares the highest percentage (42%), followed by molestation (21.%). 11.0% cases are that of rape, 11.7% of kidnapping and  abduction, and 1.0% of Immoral Trafficking. It is also significant to note that 6.0% cases are of sexual harassment and 4.1% of Dowry deaths.

• Out of a total 20771 victims, there were 617 victims who were less than 10 years of age, 1355 in the age-group 10‐14 years, 3152 in the age-group 14-18 years, 11984 in the age-group 18-23 years, 3530 in the age-group of 30-50 years and 133 in the age-group greater than 50 years.

• According to National Family Health Survey–III (2005-06) in the rural sector currently married women take 26% decisions regarding obtaining health care for herself and 7.6% in case of purchasing major household items. 10% decisions are taken by females in respect of visiting their family or relatives. For urban areas, these figures are 29.7%, 10.4% and 12.2% respectively.

• According to the pilot Time Use Survey conducted in 18,620 households spread over six selected States, namely, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Orissa, Tamil Nadu and Meghalaya during the period June 1998 to July 1999, women spent about 2.1 hours per day on cooking food and about 1.1 hours on cleaning the households and utensils. Men’s participation in these activities was nominal. Taking care of children was one of the major responsibilities of women, as they spent about 3.16 hours per week on these activities as compared to only 0.32 hours by males. There were far fewer women in the paid workforce than there were men. There were more unemployed women than there were unemployed men.  

• In 2007-08, at primary and middle school level, there were 80 and 67 female teachers respectively per 100 male teachers. At the secondary school level, it was 61 female teachers per 100 male teachers.

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The key findings of the World Development Report 2012-Gender Equality and Development, which has been brought out by the World Bank, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTWDR2012/Resources/7778105-1299699968583/7786210-1315936222006/Complete-Report.pdf are as follows:

•    Women now represent 40 percent of the global labor force, 43 percent of the world’s agricultural labor force, and more than half the world’s university students. Productivity will be raised if their skills and talents are used more fully. Eliminating barriers that discriminate against women working in certain sectors or occupations could increase labor productivity by as much as 25 percent in some countries.

•    Between 1980 and 2008, the gender gap in labor force participation narrowed from 32 percentage points to 26 percentage points.

•    Female labor force participation is lowest in the Middle East and Northern Africa (26 percent) and South Asia (35 percent) and highest in East Asia and the Pacific (64 percent) and Sub-Saharan Africa (61 percent).

•    The share of women parliamentarians increased only from 10 percent to 17 percent between 1995 and 2009.

•    In India, giving power to women at the local level (through political quotas) led to increases in the provision of public goods (both female-preferred ones such as water and sanitation and male-preferred goods such as irrigation and schools) and reduced corruption. Bribes paid by men and women in villages with a female leader were 2.7 to 3.2 percentage points less than in villages with a male leader.

•    In India and Nepal, giving women a bigger say in managing forests significantly improved conservation outcomes.

•    The financial constraints that poor women face in accessing maternal health services need special attention. One way to help is to provide poor women with cash transfers conditional on their seeking maternal care. An example is India’s Janani Suraksha Yojana, where such transfers increased the uptake of assisted deliveries in the presence of a skilled attendant by around 36 percent.

•    In India, the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Mobile Creches is experimenting with different models for providing child-care services for women employed in the rural informal sector and on public works programs. Similar efforts have been undertaken in the Indian state of Gujarat by the Self Employed Women’s Association, which has set up day-care centers for the 0–6-year-old children of its members.

•    Together with Pradan, Mobile Creches built a group of centers in remote rural areas in the states of Jharkhand and Bihar following discussions with local women about the child-care constraints they faced in accessing income-generating activities (specifically, yarn production) in their communities. These centers follow a community-based model, relying on employers as well as the broader community for their management, contribution of food materials, and training and selection of teachers.

•    The Agricultural Technology Management Agency in India targeted women in Orissa to set up self help groups in conjunction with community organizations to provide agricultural extension. These groups led women to diversify their agricultural income sources.

•    The Deccan Development Society in India has been organizing groups of women to lease or purchase tracts of land to increase women’s access to land markets.

•    In India, a woman’s higher earned income increases her children’s years of schooling.

•    In India, despite stellar economic growth in recent years, maternal mortality is almost six times the rate in Sri Lanka.

•    A fifth of married women in India are not involved in spending decisions, even about their own incomes.

•    In India, owning property substantially enhances women’s voice in the household on various matters and reduces her risk of domestic violence.

•    In India, a program run by an NGO, the Foundation of Occupational Development, organized groups of women to focus on marketing, provided them with access to cell phones and the Internet, thus helping them market their products directly and increase their profit margins.

•    The rise of outsourcing in India offers new opportunities for women in the wage sector and increases parental investments in girls’ education. Recruitment services that informed families about new employment opportunities for Indian women increased the chances of girls ages 5–15 years to be in school by 3 to 5 percentage points but had no effect on boys. The girls also had higher body mass index (a measure of health) and were 10 percent more likely to be employed in wage work. Perceived improvements in the likelihood of a job triggered investments in human capital for girls even when there were no changes in other potential limiting factors, such as poverty, cost, or distance to school. Evidence of greater returns was enough to stimulate greater human capital accumulation.

•    ICT-related jobs were concentrated in software, call centers, and geographical information systems, and clustered in Malaysia and India, particularly in Delhi and Mumbai, where call centers employ more than 1 million people, most of them women.

•    41 percent of women interviewed in Bolivia, the Arab Republic of Egypt, India, and Kenya declared that owning a mobile phone had increased their income and their access to economic opportunities. The impacts were significantly higher among female entrepreneurs: female business owners reported that they were 2.5 times more likely than nonbusiness owners to use their mobile phone to earn income, and they were significantly more interested than other women in receiving services such as notifications of money transfers on their phones (63 percent versus 41 percent).

•    Thirty-four percent of women in rural Bolivia, Egypt, India, and Kenya reallocated resources away from other items to pay for a phone subscription, compared with 20 percent among all women surveyed and 12 percent among women who do paid work.

•    In India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, subcontracted workers suffered from precarious job security, an almost total absence of benefits, and a general impossibility to organize and fight for their rights. Yet in many cases, subcontracted work was the only possible paid employment that women could take that meshed with family responsibilities or social norms.

•    In India, the decline in women’s share of industrial employment (from 21.3 percent in 1989–90 to 17.5 percent in 1994–95) despite high export growth was associated with an increase in subcontracting to home-based workers or small manufacturers that work on a piece-rate basis.

•    Experience from India and Mexico shows that equalizing provisions of inheritance laws between women and men increases asset ownership by women.

•    Reforms to inheritance laws in India resulted in delays in marriage for girls, more education (increasing the number of years of schooling by an average of 11–25 percent), and lower dowry payments

•    Changes in inheritance laws that gave equal rights to daughters in some South Indian states increased the likelihood that women inherited land.

•    In Kerala, India, women’s independent ownership of immovable property is a significant predictor of long-term physical and psychological domestic violence, over and above the effects of other factors. The odds of being beaten if a woman owns both a house and land are a twentieth of those when she owns neither. In short, women’s property ownership is associated with significantly lower levels of domestic violence.

•    In India, a constitutional amendment to set aside 33 percent of parliamentary seats for women has been under discussion since 1996. Supported by many women’s groups, it has failed to pass.

•    The Indian state of Tamil Nadu introduced 188 all-women police units to cover both rural and urban areas and to focus on crimes against women. These units increased women’s comfort in approaching the police, including making reports of domestic abuse.

•    In 11 of 13 countries with data—including India, Romania, Sierra Leone, Sweden, and the United States—women make up less than 20 percent of the police force

•    A survey reveals that almost all police officers interviewed in India agreed that a husband is allowed to rape his wife, half the judges felt that women who were abused by their spouses were partly to blame for their situation, and 68 percent of them said provocative attire was an invitation to rape.

•    In India, the ability of women to use their earnings to influence household decisions depends on their social background, with women with weaker links to their ancestral communities more able to challenge social norms and reap the benefits of autonomous incomes. About 20 percent of the participants in the WDR 2012 study said that husbands have complete control over their wives’ autonomous earnings (the share was a little more pronounced in rural areas).

•    Men who experience economic stress were more likely to use violence against their intimate partners than those who did not in regions of Brazil, Chile, Croatia, and India. They were also more likely to suffer from depression, and in India, men who experience economic stress are two and a half times more likely than their peers to regularly abuse alcohol, which presents a health risk for them as well as a risk factor for domestic violence.

•    In India, villagers who had never had a female leader preferred male leaders and perceived hypothetical female leaders to be less effective than their male counterparts, even when stated performance was identical. Exposure to a female leader did not alter villagers’ preference for male leaders, but it did weaken stereotypes about gender roles in the public and domestic spheres, and it eliminated the negative perception among male villagers about female leaders’ effectiveness.

•    A study of political reservation for women in India showed that teenage girls who have repeated exposure to women leaders are more likely to express aspirations that challenge traditional norms, such as a desire to marry later, have fewer children, and obtain jobs requiring higher education.

•    In rural India, cable television affected gender attitudes, resulting in decreased fertility (primarily through increased birth spacing) and bringing gender attitudes in rural areas much closer to those in urban areas. Women with access to cable were less likely than others to express a son preference or to report that it is acceptable for a husband to beat his wife.

•    In India, daughters-in-law face a higher work burden than daughters.

•    In India, among those with access to microcredit, women with an existing business increased their consumption of durable goods; women with a high probability of becoming business owners did the same, and at the same time reduced their nondurable consumption, which is consistent with the need to pay fixed costs to enter entrepreneurship.

•    In India, the absence of land titles significantly limits women farmers’ access to institutional credit.

•    In Karnataka, India, 29 percent of land-holding male-headed households received an extension visit, while 18 percent of female-headed households did. For livestock extension, by contrast, 79 percent of female-headed households had contact with an extension agent, against 72 percent for male-headed households

•    Evidence from Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ghana, India, Malawi, South Africa, and Uganda also suggests that young women’s friendship networks are less robust than those of their male peers.

•    Increased economic opportunities for young girls can also change their own and their communities’ perceptions of gender roles for adolescent girls. A study of a program in Delhi that linked communities to recruiters for high-paying telephone work found that these communities were more likely to have lower expectations of dowry and to find it acceptable for women to live alone before marriage and to work before and after marriage or childbirth

•    Women workers in the informal sector have challenged their employers and sometimes the state through such organizations as the Self Employed Women’s Association in India and Nijera Kori in Bangladesh. These groups have provided voice for women and created space for public action to counter the resistance to reform.

•    The expansion of economic opportunities for women in service industries in Bangladesh and India has boosted school enrollments for girls, which feeds into higher labor force participation and better educational outcomes for the next generation.

•    North Indian states are a notable exception; women have grown taller at a much slower rate than men, and girls’ anthropometric outcomes remain worse than boys—both in levels and in changes over time.

•    In India, fertility was high and stable through 1960 and then sharply declined from 6 births per woman to 2.3 by 2009.

•    In India, the median boy and girl ages 15–19 in the wealthiest fifth of the population reach grade 10, but the median boy in the bottom fifth reaches only grade 6, and the median girl only grade 1. Across countries there is little gender disadvantage for the wealthiest: households in the top income quintile tend to achieve full gender parity in education.

•    Since 1990, both India and Equatorial Guinea had declines of 41 percent in their maternal mortality ratios, which fell to similar levels in 2008, but the two countries had radically different growth trajectories—a mere 3 percent a year in Equatorial Guinea compared with a solid 8 percent in India.

•    Improvements in women’s education and health have been linked to better outcomes for their children in countries as varied as Brazil, Nepal, Pakistan, and Senegal.

•    Skewed sex ratios at birth is a problem in a few parts of the world, including China, parts of India, and parts of the Caucasus and the Western Balkans. The underlying cause is son preference among households, which has been exacerbated in some of these places by rapid income growth. Higher incomes have increased access to ultrasound technologies that assist in sex selection at birth.

•    Overall, missing girls at birth and excess female mortality under age 60 totaled an estimated 3.9 million women in 2008—85 percent of them were in China, India, and Sub-Saharan Africa.

•    Missing girls at birth reflect overt discrimination in the household, resulting from the combination of strong preferences for sons combined with declining fertility and the spread of technologies that allow parents to know the sex before birth. This is a particular issue in China and North India (although now spreading to other parts of India), but it is also visible in parts of the Caucasus and the Western Balkans.

•    In 2008 alone, an estimated 1 million girls in China and 250,000 girls in India were missing at birth. The abuse of new technologies for sex-selective abortions—such as cheap mobile ultrasound clinics—accounted for much of this shortfall, despite laws against such practices in many nations, such as India and China. Economic prosperity will continue to increase amniocentesis and ultrasound services throughout the developing world, possibly enabling the diffusion of sex-selective abortions where son-preferences exist.

•    More than 1.3 million girls are not born in China and India every year because of overt discrimination and the spread of ultrasound technologies that allow households to determine the sex of the fetus before birth. Informal institutions that generate a preference for sons are the primary bottleneck.

•    The three population groupings—China (with a population of 1.3 billion), India (1.15 billion), and Sub-Saharan Africa (0.8 billion)—together account for 87 percent of the world’s missing girls and excess female mortality.

•    The higher mortality rates for girls and women in the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami have been related to their more limited mobility caused by restrictive clothing and caring for small children.

•    Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, and Indonesia have maternal mortality ratios comparable to Sweden’s around 1900, and Afghanistan’s is similar to Sweden’s in the 17th century.

•    In 2008, there were 63,000 maternal deaths in India and 203,000 in Sub-Saharan Africa (56.7 percent of the global total), in stark contrast to rich countries, with only 1,900 maternal deaths.

•    As was discovered in Bangladesh in the early 1970s and India in the 1980s, girls are less likely to be vaccinated, less likely to be given medical care, and less likely to receive nutrition at home.

•    Research: Of all papers published in the top 202 economics journals between 1985 and 2004, 149 papers were on Pakistan and 1,093 on India—but there were no papers on the Central African Republic, 1 on Chad, 14 on Benin, 2 on Guinea Bissau, and 20 on Niger. Only for Burkina Faso (47) and Nigeria (148) do the numbers start picking up.

•    Gender gaps in primary education have closed in almost all countries. In secondary education, these gaps are closing rapidly and have reversed in many countries, especially in Latin America, the Caribbean, and East Asia—but it is now boys and young men who are disadvantaged. Among developing countries, girls now outnumber boys in secondary schools in 45 countries and there are more young women than men in universities in 60 countries.

•    Two-thirds of all countries have reached gender parity in primary education enrollments, while in over one-third, girls significantly outnumber boys in secondary education.

•    Since 1980, women are living longer than men in all parts of the world. And, in low-income countries, women now live 20 years longer on average than they did in 1960.

•    Female life expectancy increased dramatically in developing countries (by 20 to 25 years in most regions in the past 50 years) to reach 71 years globally in 2007 (compared with 67 for men), and women now outlive men in every region of the world.

•    Over half a billion women have joined the world’s labor force over the last 30 years as women’s participation in paid work has risen in most of the developing world.

•    Females are more likely to die, relative to males, in many low- and middle-income countries than their counterparts in rich countries. These deaths are estimated at about 3.9 million women and girls under the age of 60 each year. About two-fifths of them are never born, one-sixth die in early childhood, and over one-third die in their reproductive years.

•    Despite the overall progress, primary and secondary school enrollments for girls remain much lower than for boys for disadvantaged populations in many Sub-Saharan countries and some parts of South Asia.

•     The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that equalizing access to productive resources between female and male farmers could increase agricultural output in developing countries by as much as 2.5 to 4 percent.

•    Eliminating barriers that prevent women from working in certain occupations or sectors would have similar positive effects, reducing the productivity gap between male and female workers by one-third to one-half and increasing output per worker by 3 to 25 percent across a range of countries.

•    It took more than 100 years for the number of children born to a woman in the United States to decline from 6 to 3; the same decline took just over 35 years in India and less than 20 in Iran.

•    Globally, excess female mortality after birth and “missing” girls at birth account every year for an estimated 3.9 million women below the age of 60. About two-fifths of them are never born, one-fifth goes missing in infancy and childhood, and the remaining two-fifths do so between the ages of 15 and 59

•    The Young Lives study looked at educational aspirations and noncognitive skills of boys and girls at ages 8, 12, and 15 for 12,000 children in Ethiopia, Andhra Pradesh in India, Peru, and Vietnam. Parental aspirations for the education of their children were biased toward boys in Ethiopia and India by the age of 12 and toward girls in Peru and Vietnam. By the age of 15, these biases had been transmitted to children, with clearly higher educational aspirations among boys in Ethiopia and India, and among girls in Vietnam. And by age 15, measures of agency or efficacy showed a strong pro-male bias in India and Ethiopia but not in Peru and Vietnam.

•    Only 27 percent of children ages 10 and 11 in India can read a simple passage, do a simple division problem, tell the time, and handle money. This low learning is not an Indian problem; it recurs in nearly all low- and middle-income countries. This low learning is not an Indian problem; it recurs in nearly all low- and middle-income countries. For the developing countries as a whole, 21.3 percent of 15-year-old children tested by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) could not achieve level 1 proficiency in mathematics—the most basic skills.
 

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Please click the following link in order to know the Trends in Maternal Mortality: 1990 to 2008 Estimates developed by WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA and The World Bank:

http://www.im4change.org/hunger-hdi/mdgs-113.html

According to Progress of the World's Women: In Pursuit of Justice 2011-12, UN-Women
http://progress.unwomen.org/pdfs/EN-Report-Progress.pdf:  

•    Some 600 million women, more than half the world’s working women, are in vulnerable employment, trapped in insecure jobs, often outside the purview of labour legislation.

•    Globally, 53 percent of working women are employed in vulnerable jobs, as own-account workers or as unpaid workers in family businesses or farms. In South Asia and

•    Sub-Saharan Africa, more than 80 percent of women workers are in this kind of employment. Millions work in the informal economy as home-based workers and paid domestic workers.

•    According to International Labour Organization (ILO) data from 18 countries, domestic work accounts for between 4 and 10 percent of the workforce in developing countries, and between 1 and 2.5 percent in developed countries. Between 74 and 94 percent of domestic workers in these countries are women.

•    In South Asia alone, there are 50 million home-based workers, of whom four out of five are women. Home work ranges from traditional crafts such as weaving or embroidery, and processing natural products like making rope or shelling cashew nuts, to industrial work, such as making leather shoes, garments or trimming rubber and plastic parts. It is usually labour-intensive and done by hand. This work almost always takes place outside of formal systems of labour or social regulation, without basic rights to a minimum wage, social security or a pension.

•    Globally, the proportion of working age women in formal employment or seeking work stood at 53 percent in 2009, unchanged since 1991.

•    Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) is an international treaty adopted by the United Nations General Assembly to protect and promote women’s rights. Since entering into force in 1981, the legally binding treaty has been ratified by 186 United Nations Member States.

•    Based on available information from 83 countries, the ILO reports that women are generally paid between 10 and 30 percent less than men. According to the International Trade Union Congress, the average gender pay gap is 29 percent in Argentina, 22 percent in Poland and 24 percent in the Republic of Korea. These wage gaps reflect the fact that women doing the same or comparable jobs are paid less than men for the same work, but they are also indicative of the fact that women tend to be concentrated in low-paid work.

•    According to the most recent data, global poverty rates have declined significantly, due largely to progress in China and India. The number of people in developing countries living on less than $1.25 a day fell from 1.8 billion in 1990 to 1.4 billion in 2005. The ILO estimates that in 2010, there were 87 million unemployed women globally, up from 76 million in 2007 .

•    The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that 906 million people were under-nourished in 2010, compared to 827 million in 1990 to 1992.

•    The FAO estimates that the productivity gains from ensuring equal access to fertilizers, seeds and tools for women could reduce the number of hungry people by between 100 and 150 million.

•    In South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, the majority of women are farm workers. Women do more unpaid work than men in all regions.

•    Women are more likely than men to live in poverty in 22 out of the 25 countries for which data are available.

•    When Bhanwari Devi was gang-raped by local men while doing her job as a social worker in a village in Rajasthan, India she not only initiated criminal proceedings, but she also sought a broader remedy for other working women. Supported by five women’s organizations, including Vishaka, she took the case to the Indian Supreme Court, where in 1997 she eventually won watershed recognition of sexual harassment in the workplace, against which the Government had an obligation to provide legal protection.

•    The Government of India introduced a long-awaited bill prohibiting sexual harassment in the workplace in 2007.

•    173 countries guarantee paid maternity leave. 139 constitutions guarantee gender equality. 125 countries outlaw domestic violence. 117 countries outlaw sexual harassment. 117 countries have equal pay laws. 115 countries guarantee women's equal property rights. 93 countries have equal inheritance rights.

•    A review of legislation in 126 countries and territories indicates that 42 have laws in place to guarantee paid paternity leave. The Government of Sweden has had a policy of paid parental leave since 1974, with women and men equally entitled to take time off.

•    According to the World Bank, at least 115 countries specifically recognize women’s property rights on equal terms to men. Even in those countries with laws in place, women’s actual control over land is limited. In 1994, the states of Karnataka and Maharashtra in India amended the Hindu Succession Act to give daughters the same inheritance rights as their brothers.

•    In Europe, abortion is rarely permitted in 2 out of 37 countries. In Asia, abortion is rarely permitted in 18 out of 47 countries. In Africa, abortion is rarely permitted in 21 out of 52 countries. In Latin America and the Carribean, abortion is rarely permitted in 14 out of 30 countries. One in seven maternal deaths is caused by unsafe abortion.

•    Five countries outlaw abortion under any circumstances, even when the mother’s life is at risk and 61 countries only allow abortion under very rare circumstances. As a result of such restrictions, approximately 20 million unsafe abortions are carried out annually, killing an estimated 68,000 women each year.

•    In 48 countries, there are limitations on the industries in which women can work. The most common restrictions are on jobs that involve heavy lifting or arduous work; jobs that threaten a woman’s mental and physical health; and work in mines, quarries or underground. In 11 countries, female employment is restricted in jobs that are ‘against women’s morals’.

•    In 13 countries across six regions, laws specify that women must retire at a younger age than men. In 50 countries, the minimum legal age of marriage is lower for females, exposing girls to the risks of early marriage. In the developing world, more than one third of women aged 20 to 24 report that they were married or in a union by the age of 18. Early marriage curtails girls’ opportunities for education and exposes them to the risks of early pregnancy and childbirth, the leading causes of death for girls aged 15 to 19 in developing countries.

•    Same-sex activity between consenting adults is criminalized in 40 percent of the countries surveyed. In 53 countries, consensual homosexual acts between adult women are illegal. Such laws and policies deny lesbian, transgender and bisexual women the protection of the law and limit their access to services.

•    Since 2000, a number of countries have decriminalized homosexuality, including Armenia, Fiji, Nepal and Nicaragua. Six countries prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in their Constitutions: the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Ecuador, Portugal, South Africa, Sweden and Switzerland.

•    As of April 2011, 125 countries have passed legislation on domestic violence, including almost all countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Two thirds of all countries have also taken steps to make workplaces and public spaces safer for women, by passing laws to prohibit sexual harassment.

•    Two thirds of countries have laws in place against domestic violence, but many countries still do not explicitly criminalize rape within marriage.

•    As of April 2011, 52 countries have amended their legislation to explicitly make marital rape a criminal offence.

•    In 17 out of 41 countries, a quarter or more people think that it is justifiable for a man to beat his wife.

•    Another area of women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights that is increasingly being subject to criminal law is HIV transmission. Criminalization takes two forms: through the application of existing criminal law and through new laws that specifically criminalize HIV transmission. There are 63 countries that have HIV-specific criminal laws: 27 in Africa, 13 in Asia, 11 in Latin America and the Caribbean, nine in Europe, two in Oceania and one in North America. In 17 countries, these laws have been used to prosecute individuals for transmitting HIV.

•    Across 57 countries, on average 10 percent of women say they have experienced sexual assault, but of these only 11 percent reported it. This compares to a similar incidence of robbery, on average 8 percent, but a reporting rate of 38 percent. A 2009 study of European countries found that, on average, 14 percent of reported rapes ended in a conviction, with rates falling as low as 5 percent.

•    In 23 out of 52 countries, less than half of women and men say they have confidence in their country’s justice system. In 18 out of 30 countries, more than half of women have no say in household decisions.

•    Data from 39 countries show that the presence of women police officers correlates positively with reporting of sexual assault, which confirms that recruiting women is an important component of a gender-responsive justice system. Globally, women average just 9 percent of the police, with rates falling as low as 2 percent in some parts of the world. On average, women do not make up more than 13 percent of the police force in any region. Since the opening of women’s police stations in 13 Latin American countries, the visibility of violence against women and levels of reporting have increased.

•    Globally, women account for 27 percent of all judges. Women’s representation in the judiciary approaches 50 percent in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, but in South Asia progress is less encouraging. One study in the United States found that women judges were 11 percent more likely to rule in favour of the plaintiff in employment discrimination cases.

•    Significant advances have been made towards achieving universal primary education, with the number of out-of-school children falling from 106 million in 1999 to 67 million in 2009. In developing regions, there were 96 girls for every 100 boys enrolled in primary school, up from 91 in 1999. In 2009, girls accounted for 53 percent of all out-of-school children.

•    Progress has been made on the goal of gender parity in secondary schooling, with 96 girls for every 100 boys enrolled in secondary school in 2009, up from 88 girls for every 100 boys in 1999.

•    The global share of women in wage employment in the non-agricultural sector was 40 percent in 2009, an increase of just 5 percentage points since 1990.

•    When women access the labour market they are often unable to secure decent jobs. Globally, more than half of women (53 percent) work in vulnerable employment, rising to more than 80 percent of women in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

•    The mortality rate for children under the age of five has dropped by more than a third from 89 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 60 per 1,000 in 2009.

•    Early marriage puts mothers and children at risk. Pregnancy and childbirth are the leading causes of death for girls aged 15 to 19 in developing countries.

•    Child mortality increases by 60 percent if the mother is under the age of 18, attributed to health complications in pregnancy and labour, and a lack of knowledge of and access to reproductive health care services.

•    The economist Amartya Sen estimated that 100 million women were ‘missing’ in Asia in 1990 as a result of prenatal sex selection, infanticide and neglect. New estimates put the figure at 134 million. Developed regions have reached 30 percent critical mass for share of women in ministerial positions, but no region has achieved the mark for the proportion of women in parliament.

•    Under-five mortality rates for girls are significantly higher in several countries in Asia, even though girls are physiologically predisposed to have higher survival rates than boys. For example, the underfive mortality rate for girls in India in 2008 was 73 per 1,000 live births, compared to 65 for boys. In China, the rate for girls was 24, compared to 18 for boys.

•    Across all regions, under-five mortality is much higher among children from the poorest households than those from the richest. According to United Nations estimates, the sex ratio at birth has increased globally from a stable 105 in the early 1970s to a recent peak of 107.

•    In 2008, it is estimated that 358,000 women died in pregnancy or childbirth. The number of maternal deaths has decreased by 2.3 percent per year since 1990, far below the 5.5 percent needed to reduce maternal deaths by three quarters by 2015.

•    In addition to deaths, over 300 million women worldwide suffer long-term health problems and disability arising from complications in pregnancy or delivery.

•    It is estimated that up to 70 percent of maternal deaths could be prevented through the availability of maternal and reproductive health care services and adequate family planning.

•    Globally, there were 33.3 million people living with HIV in 2009 and women were 53 percent of those in developing countries and 21 percent in developed regions. Almost 80 percent of all women living with HIV are in sub-Saharan Africa. More than 5 million people received antiretroviral treatment in 2009. Although this represents a 30 percent increase since 2008, it is only 35 percent of those who needed it.

•    In India, around 90 percent of women living with HIV acquired the virus while in a long-term relationship. Women’s risk of infection is increased by their lack of decision-making power.

•    There are more than half a million women and girls in penal institutions around the world. Prisons are almost always designed for the majority male prison population and rarely meet women’s needs. In 2010, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the ‘Bangkok Rules’, to provide guidance to Member States on the treatment of female prisoners.

•    In most countries, women make up between 2 and 9 percent of the prison population, with the highest rates of imprisonment in China, the Russian Federation, Thailand and the United States. Female imprisonment rates are increasing rapidly.

•    Sexual violence as a tactic of warfare has been used systematically and deliberately for centuries. It creates shame and stigma and has in the past been perpetrated with almost complete impunity. Sexual violence is used against civilian populations to destroy the social fabric of communities, as a deliberate vector of HIV, for the purpose of forced impregnation, to drive the forcible displacement of populations and to terrorize whole communities. In Rwanda, it is estimated that between 250,000 and 500,000 women were raped in less than 100 days, as part of the 1994 genocide, in which 800,000 people were killed. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, between 20,000 and 60,000 mostly Muslim women were subjected to sexual violence in ‘rape camps’.
 

According to Women and Labour Markets in Asia: Rebalancing for Gender Equality (2011), which has been brought out by International Labour Organization (ILO) and Asian Development Bank (ADB), http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---asia/---ro-bangkok/documents/publication/wcms_154846.pdf:  

•    The Asia and Pacific region is losing US$42 billion to US$47 billion annually because of women’s limited access to employment opportunities, and another US$16 billion to US$30 billion annually as a result of gender gaps in education. Failure to achieve Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target 3 on the promotion of gender equality and empowerment of women could reduce per capita income growth rates by 0.1–0.3 percentage points.

•    The annual average employment growth for 2000–2007 was higher for Asian women than for Asian men, and the employment-to-population ratio for Asian women was also higher than the world average for women. But 45 per cent of working-age Asian women were inactive compared to 19 per cent of men.

•    45 per cent of the productive potential of Asian women, as measured by the share of women outside the labour force, remained untapped compared to 19 percent of Asian men. And the likelihood of men working was much higher at 77 per cent relative to 53 per cent for women. Furthermore, when compared to Asia’s high GDP growth rate, overall employment growth was dismal for both women and men; and when compared to the global female employment elasticity of 0.47, the Asian figure of 0.27 suggests that Asian women gained less than women worldwide in terms of employment growth.

•    The female LFPR was 55.5 while that of males was 80.7 per cent in 2009. The largest gender gaps were in Central Asia and South Asia, where the female LFPRs were the lowest in Asia. The labour force participation rate (LFPR) measures the proportion of a country’s working age population that engages actively in the labour market either by working or looking for work.

•    Asia is unique in both its relatively low female unemployment rate and its positive male-female gap (the regional unemployment rate for women was 4.3 per cent in 2009, compared to 4.7 per cent for men and well below the global female rate of 6.5 per cent).

•    Only 1 per cent of all women workers in Asia were running their own business with paid employees; the entrepreneurial capabilities of Asian women are far from being tapped.

•    South Asia had the highest rate of vulnerable employment (which includes family workers and own-account workers) among all regions in the world at 84.5 per cent for women and 74.8 per cent for men.

•    For Asia as a whole, 48.2 per cent of women worked in the agricultural sector in 2009, compared to 38.9 per cent of men. In the Pacific Islands and South Asia, the concentration of employed women in agriculture was especially heavy.

•    The six service sectors in Asia where women accounted for more than 50 per cent of the workforce were health and social work, education, private households with employed persons, hotels and restaurants, and financial intermediation.

•    The “feminization” of employment in labour-intensive manufacturing in Asia’s export processing zones/special economic zones (with women accounting for between 70 to 90 per cent of the workforce) was a hot topic especially in the 1990s and early 2000s.

•    In India women represent only 31 per cent of the total workforce and 32 per cent of the informal workforce but of the female workforce, 96 per cent are informally employed.

•    In India in the latest national labour force survey conducted in 2004/05, 36.1 per cent of employed women are considered working poor on the basis of US$ 1 per day versus a working poverty rate of 30 per cent for men; and 86.4 per cent of employed women live with their families on less than US$ 2 per person per day, versus 81.4 per cent of employed men.

•    Gender earning differentials in the informal economy mirror, and in many cases surpass, those in the formal sector due to both vertical and horizontal segregation in employment and continuing gender inequalities associated with women’s unpaid reproductive work.

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According to The World's Women and Girls: 2011, Population Reference Bureau, http://www.prb.org/pdf11/world-women-girls-2011-data-sheet.pdf:

• In India during 2005-06, 30 percent of women and 26 men agreed that wife beating is acceptable if a wife argues with her husband

• During 2005-06, 14 percent women and 8 percent men in India agreed that wife beating is acceptable if a wife refuses sex with her husband

• In many countries, men make the decisions regarding household purchases for both daily items and larger purchases, limiting women’s economic empowerment in the home. Additionally, when women cannot decide when to visit their own family, they are subject to social isolation and their personal autonomy is reduced.

• 45 percent, 40 percent, 25 percent of women aged 20-24 years in South Central Asia, sub-Sahran Africa and Latin America and the Carribean respectively get married by age 18 years. 47% of women in India between the ages of 20 and 24 were married by 18.

• Total fertility rate (TFR) i.e. the average number of children a woman would have throughout her childbearing years (usually considered to be aged 15 to 49 years) in India is 2.6.

• Percentage of Indian women aged 15-19 years giving birth in one year i.e. births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 19 (the age-specific fertility rate), divided by 10 is 6.

• Percentage of married Indian women using modern contraceptives (include clinic and supply methods such as the pill, injectables, implants, IUD, condom, and sterilization) is 49.

• Percentage of births attended by skilled personnel (includes doctors, nurses and midwives) in India is 47.

• Maternal mortality ratio, the number of deaths to women per 100,000 live births (2008) in India is 230.

• Percentage of the female population aged 15 to 24 in India who can both read and write, with understanding, a short simple statement on everyday life is 74 whereas the same figure for male population is 88.

• Women as percentage of Indian Parliament in 2010 is 11.

• Women as percentage of nonfarm wage earners (2005-2010) in India is 18.

• Female secondary school enrollment as percent of male enrollment (2005-2010) in India is 88.

• Without sex-selective abortion, the natural sex ratio is 1.05 (about 105 boys born for every 100 girls). However, in countries where sex-selective abortion takes place, the birth ratios are much higher than 1.05, meaning a disproportionate number of boys are born. Sex-selective abortion has significant consequences for the number of men and women in an overall population. However, the United Nations projects that highly skewed sex ratios in most countries will decline in the coming decades. Only India is projected to remain steady at 1.08.

According to Gender dimensions of agricultural and rural employment: Differentiated pathways out of poverty—Status, trends and gaps, which has been brought out by FAO, IFAD and ILO, http://www.fao.org/docrep/013/i1638e/i1638e.pdf:

• Unpaid work on family agricultural enterprises accounts for 34 percent of women’s informal employment in India (compared with 11 percent of men’s informal employment) and for an astonishing 85 percent in Egypt (compared with 10 percent for men).

• Agriculture continues to be the main source of rural employment for both women and men in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia. In Latin America, rural female workers appear equally distributed between agricultural and non-agricultural sectors (with self-employment more prevalent in agriculture than in manufacturing and services), while rural men work mostly in agriculture, either as self-employed or wage workers. 

• Gender differences in employment status appear to be more marked in South Asia, where only 13 percent of adult women are self-employed in agriculture compared with 33 percent of men, and less than 6 percent of rural women work in non-agricultural sectors compared with 27 percent of men. It is interesting to note that in South Asia, women appear somewhat equally distributed between wage work and self-employment (13 percent and 12 percent, respectively) within agriculture, whereas most men who work in agriculture are self-employed. Women in South Asia are relatively more engaged in agricultural wage employment than are women in any other region, most likely the result of women’s weaker property rights in land and other assets than in most other regions, coupled with increasing landlessness.

• South Asian women are also more likely to remain unpaid for work on their own family business than in any other region: ILO data for 2007 indicate that 59 percent of the total female labour force in South Asia works as contributing family workers, compared with 36 percent in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, 35 percent in sub-Saharan Africa and only 7 percent in Latin America. The corresponding shares for men are 18 percent in South Asia, 18 percent in sub-Saharan Africa and 4 percent in Latin America.

• Agriculture is a female-intensive activity in both India and Bangladesh and in Bangladesh provides employment to more than 60 percent of the total female labour force (mostly in the form of rice production and poultry rearing). In Sri Lanka, agriculture appears to be less labour- and female-intensive than in the other two South Asian countries.

• In the case of India, the share of the female adult population in both agriculture and non-agriculture work is higher than regional averages, and the share of female casual agricultural labour is especially significant (about 30 percent of the total female rural workforce). Of note, in particular, is the high share of the rural male labour force working in non-agricultural activities relative to the high share of the rural female labour force working in agriculture, suggesting some ‘feminization of agriculture’. Since the 1990s, a number of studies on gender and rural employment have been pointing to the ‘feminization of agriculture’, attributing it partly to the trends described previously. The term ‘feminization of agriculture’ can mean different things and should be used with care. It refers broadly to women’s increasing presence (or visibility) in the agricultural labour force, whether as agricultural wage workers, independent producers or unremunerated family workers. Others use the term to indicate deterioration in the quality of agricultural work.

• Women contribute substantially to total productive work in male-headed households in Zimbabwe (about 40 percent of the total) but not in Ethiopia (where women’s contribution can be less than 10 percent). In Zimbabwe, the vast majority of the work involves own farming (more than 90 percent of total activities), while in Uganda waged work/business constitutes between 26 percent and 29 percent of total work. The share of waged work/business in total employment is highest in Andhra Pradesh, India (more than 50 percent of the total). This could be expected, as Andhra Pradesh is a strong-performing state, classified as in between a ‘transforming’ and ‘urbanized’ economy.

• Farm work is mostly provided by men (except in Zimbabwe, where women are the main contributors), while livestock keeping is almost exclusively a children’s activity in all the African countries. Children, more in general, seem to contribute significantly to household agricultural activities (up to seven hours per day in some regions). The share of paid work done by men relative to other family members is the highest across all African countries, and in particular in Ethiopia. In India, the share of paid work done by women, other relatives and children is higher than elsewhere and than the share done by men. This is a fascinating study, and more research of this kind would allow for more generalized understandings.

• A significant share of women in South Asia work as agricultural labourers but we do not know whether they receive similar wages and benefit from similar entitlements as male agricultural labourers.

• Some of the factors that may push women into a disadvantaged economic position relative to men in terms of the returns to their labour are: (a) employment (occupation and task) segmentation (women are disproportionately employed in low-quality jobs, including jobs in which their rights are not adequately respected and social protection is limited); (b) the gender gap in earnings (partly as a consequence of high segmentation; women earn less for a given type of work than do men – usually for both wage employment and self-employment); and (c) fewer hours of paid work but overall larger work burdens (due to competing demands of care responsibilities and non-market work, women spend less time on average in remunerated work, which lowers their total labour income and is likely to increase stress and fatigue).

• As for the agricultural sectors, there seems to be a common pattern across regions in that women tend to be the main producers of food while men appear to be managing most of the commercial crops, although not without women’s (often unpaid) contributions. Women also participate in commercial farming but within a rather rigid division of tasks. This rigidity in the gender division of tasks appears to be stronger in South Asia than in parts of Africa or Southeast Asia.

• Petty trade is a more prevalent activity for women in Africa, Latin America and some Southeast Asian countries than in South Asia. In South Asia, most female non-agricultural activities are home-based, reflecting prevailing strict norms of women’s seclusion, particularly in parts of Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan. The location of their work (within private homes) makes it more difficult to enforce legislation.

• In Asia, women produce mostly food crops, whereas men tend to diversify into commercial farming. In some countries in Southeast Asia and South Asia, women are involved in cash crops (e.g. cotton in Pakistan, peanut production in the Philippines and Thailand, poppies in Afghanistan) but the gender division of tasks remains marked. Especially in Southeast Asia, women are heavily involved in rice production, where they constitute up to 90 percent of the labour force. In Cambodia and Vietnam, female farmers also take on male tasks (such as land preparation and irrigation) when male labour is not available. In China, differences in the gender division of crops and tasks depend on agro-ecological characteristics, production systems and crop types. Where male outmigration is high, women work on both cash and food crops and perform most farming activities, including use of machinery. They become main decision makers regarding choice of crops, fertilizer use and marketing, but men retain power in public affairs at the community level (e.g. Southwestern Provinces). There are very high shares of unremunerated female family workers and increasing casualization of agricultural labour, both male and female (e.g. India).

• In Afghanistan, regions of India (Kerala and West Bengal) and Uzbekistan, women are engaged in manufacturing (e.g. dress making) and domestic and catering services but NOT in trade. In Sri Lanka, women market local agricultural produce, prepare cooked foods for sale, especially rice and flour-based foods, run small grocery shops and make and sell handicrafts. In Southeast Asia (Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam) women are involved in small trade, particularly of agricultural goods. In China, women participate in light industry. Men are mainly involved in construction, commerce, transportation and services.

• There are many home-based workers in India, and very poor working conditions for women in South Asia (e.g. limited ability to organize, particularly if home-based work; no access to social protection).

• Despite the widespread commitment of many countries to respect and promote the principle of freedom of association, the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining, the elimination of forced labour, the abolition of child labour and the elimination of all forms of discrimination in the workplace (including through ratification of a number of ILO Conventions particularly relevant to rural workers such as convention Nos. 11, 111, 129, 138, 141, 182, 184, and others), rural workers – and especially women and children – face both legal impediments and practical challenges in asserting their rights. Also, despite the hazardous nature of the work and the high levels of risk, agriculture is often the least well-covered sector in the economy as far as national occupational safety and health regulations are concerned.

• A recent study by the ILO (Breneman-Pennas and Rueda Catry, 2008) shows that globally, women’s participation in institutions for social dialogue such as labour councils and advisory boards is still limited. By region, the average share of women participants is 35 percent in the Caribbean, 12 percent in Africa and 11 percent in both Asia and Latin America. The same review also finds that the institutions starting to include gender in social dialogue are about 57 percent in Asia, 33 percent in the Caribbean and in Africa, and 25 percent in Latin America (the scope of this inclusion varies considerably). However, the extent to which these institutions specifically represent the interests of rural workers is not indicated.

• There has also been an increase in the number of other more informal organizations promoting the rights of women workers, the best known of which is probably the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India. However, these encouraging initiatives are still limited.

• In the case of India, women who work as daily casual wage earner in agriculture earn 69 percent of the wage earned by men in the same occupation. Women who work as regular wage earner in agriculture earn 79 percent of the wage earned by men in the same occupation. Women who work as casual wage earner in non-agriculture earn 65 percent of the wage earned by men in the same occupation. Women who work as regular wage earner in non-agriculture earn 57 percent of the wage earned by men in the same occupation.

• ILO data show that in 2007 the overall working poverty rate was 58 percent in sub-Saharan Africa, 47 percent in South Asia, about 16 percent in Southeast Asia and 7 percent in Latin America. Many rural workers remain poor because they receive low earnings and live and work in precarious conditions, are vulnerable to health and other shocks and have little access to risk-coping mechanisms such as insurance or social assistance; in other words, they only have access to ‘indecent’ work. Poverty can push women into employment – the so-called ‘distress sale of labour’ – often in informal and poorly paid jobs (a vicious circle).

• Evidence from South Asia also shows that rural women from poorer households are more likely to take up paid employment, particularly as wage workers, than women from wealthier families.

• Boserup (1970) distinguished between a ‘male farming system’ and a ‘female farming system’. The ‘male farming system’ was characterized by high incidence of landlessness, high levels of agricultural wage labour, inheritance through male lines and a low presence of women in the fields due to strict norms of female seclusion resulting in women concentrating mainly on tasks within the homestead. The ‘female farming system’ was characterized by family farming, low levels of wage labour, bilateral inheritance practices, communal ownership of land with usufruct rights for female members and high percentages of agricultural female family labourers. Women in this latter system played a major role in food production, had greater freedom of movement and were active in trade and commerce. Patterns similar to those of the ‘male system’ can still be found in the MENA region, in parts of South Asia (especially Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh). and even in some regions of Latin America. Except for Latin America, women in these countries still participate in trading in limited ways. Some characteristics of the ‘female farming system’ can be observed in sub-Saharan Africa but also in many countries of Southeast Asia.

• During the dryer summer months, women participating in a microenterprise project run by the Self-Employed Women’ s Association (SEWA) in Gujarat, India must reduce the time they spend on paid activities because of the need to spend longer hours collecting water. Reducing water collection to one hour a day would enable these women to earn an additional US$100 a year – a significant sum for a poor household. An example of a successful initiative in the area of water infrastructure is provided by SEWA’s water campaign in Gujarat. The project was about improving access to safe and reliable drinking water and involved, among others, training women to repair hand pumps. Women’s collective action was a crucial ingredient of the success. Women were initially reluctant to participate because water infrastructure was regarded as male territory and men were expressing hostility by refusing to drink water from a source built by women or to work on water structures that women managed. SEWA’s district-level functionaries and village women leaders facilitated a process of mobilization through meetings, solidarity group formation and capacity building, and acted as interface between the local women and the water board. As a result, workloads from collecting water were reduced, enabling women to devote more time to remunerated employment or to rest. More reliable and safer water provision also led to a reduction of migration to nearby villages.

• A recent social audit of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) in Tamil Nadu, India (Narayanan, 2008) indicates that about 70 percent of the women interviewed had no child care facilities at the worksite despite the provision of the NREGA that ‘in the event that there are at least five children under the age of six at the worksite, one of the female workers should be deputed to look after them and she should be paid the same wage as other NREGA workers’. About 50 percent of the women left their children at home and most of them were being dissuaded from bringing them to work. Women with children older than three years did not seem to face similar difficulties, and a large proportion of them reported sending their children to local child care centres (the ‘anganwadis’) or to school.

• Some innovative projects appear to be available to meet the demand for child care in rural contexts, particularly in India. Mobile Crèches is a voluntary organization that offers child care to women working in the construction sector. It has more than 300 centres and reaches about 200000 children across India. It approaches builders in urban and rural construction sites, with a view to opening a centre there. Those who agree provide basic facilities. SEWA also provides child care and targets groups of migrant workers. For instance, it supports women in a district of West Gujarat where many of the poorest families work in salt extraction. The salt workers have to stay in the proximity of their workplace, near the coastal desert terrains, up to eight months in a year. The children have to follow their parents, with often negative implications for their education and overall development.

• SEWA in India supports an innovative scheme providing about 100 000 women workers, in both urban and rural areas, with health insurance, including a maternity component and life and asset insurance. However, some of SEWA’s poorest members cannot afford the premiums, which have to be set at a rate that ensures financial viability. SEWA in India combines the provision of banking services with the formation of co-operatives to promote women’s economic, social and political interests.

• In India, where growing land scarcity has intensified male competition and created additional constraints to women’s usufruct, trusteeship and ownership rights, women’s access to land seems to have become more constrained. In India, the land question is also crucial because as a result of male out-migration, women remain largely confined to agriculture and they are faced with the prime responsibility for farming, but without rights to the land they cultivate.

• India study (Srivastava and Srivastava, 2009) shows a marked gender disparity in wages in agricultural and non-agricultural employment, as well as significantly lower wages for both men and women casual agricultural labourers compared with non-agricultural labourers. For both casual and regular workers, women receive lower wages than men (i.e. wages between 57 percent and almost 80 percent of men’s wages). women employed as regular workers are less discriminated against in agriculture (where they get 79 percent of the male wage) than in the other non-agriculture sectors (which pay women only 57 percent of the male wage); however, this is not the case when women work as casual labourers. This shows that women who manage to enter the formal agricultural labour market can be better remunerated; their specific competencies are given a value that is not recognized “economically” in non-agricultural work.

• In India, female farmers and agricultural workers lag behind their male counterparts at every level of educational attainment, and are between 20 and 30 percent more likely to be illiterate than males. Lower levels of educational attainment among women contribute to their being unable to compete with men for better and more skilled jobs.

• In May-June 2008, a survey of 1 060 NREGA workers in six Hindi-speaking states of North India was conducted (Khera and Nayak, 2009) to study the impact of the NREGA in the lives of workers. Significant benefits reported by the women include improvement in food security, health benefits and a chance to avoid hazardous work. Women have started earning the minimum wage, which is a big achievement. Further, a majority of women workers reported collecting their wages and keeping it. The availability of local wage employment at the statutory minimum wage for women is a new development associated with the NREGA in many of the areas covered by the survey. However, the participation of women varies widely across the survey regions. Serious problems remain in implementation across states (such as the lack of availability of child care and the continued presence of illegal contractors). Given the critical gains made by women workers – in accessing work and income, food and health care for themselves and their families, and in leaving potentially hazardous work – it is critical that problems in implementation be resolved and not derail the gains.

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According to Report on Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganised Sector, http://nceus.gov.in/Condition_of_workers_sep_2007.pdf:

• The share of agricultural workers in the female workforce is very high, 72.8 per cent in 2004-05, while for males it is much lower at 48.9 per cent.
  
  
• Among female agricultural workers, the share of those working as farmers has been slightly lower than for males in the earlier years (Employment-Unemployment Surveys of NSSO). However, in 2004-05 the share of farmers among men and women was almost equalized 64.4 per cent among women and 64 among men agricultural workers.
  
  
• Among the small farmers, 62 per cent of men and 85 per cent of women are illiterate or have education upto primary level. Only about 20 per cent of the male small farmers and 6 per cent of the female small farmers had levels of education above secondary schooling.
  
  
• Percentage of female agricultural labourers in the total workforce in rural areas has declined from 36.5% in 1999-2000 to 29.2% in 2004-05.
  
  
• The incidence of child female agricultural labourers (2.4 per cent) is higher than for child male labourers (1.5 per cent) in 2004-05.
  
  
• Gender disparity within agriculture is also high though the ratio of female wages to male agricultural manual wages has remained unchanged at about 0.70 since 1993-94 indicating that male wages are 1.4 times the female wages.
  
  
• The wage employment days available for female agricultural labourers were 196 in 1993-94, which declined to 184 in 2004-05.
  
  
• There was no feminisation of agriculture till 2000, however, the share of women workers in agriculture in 2004-05 showed an increase. The obverse is observed for the process of casualisation of female workforce in agriculture, i.e., proportion of agricultural labourers among female workers in agriculture.
  
  
• Casualisation of the workforce in agriculture occurred from 1983 to 2000 for men and women and in 2004-05 when the feminisation of the workforce seemed to have occurred, there was no further casualisation of the workforce.

According to The EU India FTA in Agriculture and Likely Impact on Indian Women by Roopam Singh & Ranja Sengupta, December, 2009, CENTAD,
http://www.esocialsciences.com/data/articles/Document1432010510.149914.pdf:

• As per the Census 2001, total work force in India is 400 million of which 68.37 percent are male workers and 31.63 percent are female workers.
  
  
• The total agriculture workforce in India is 234,270,000 as per 2001 census, of which 38.99 percent is contributed by female workforce and 60.93 percent is male workforce.
  
  
• 46.23 percent of the agricultural labourers are women whereas, 32.91 percent of the total cultivators are women who perform low end jobs. In comparison, 67.09% of cultivators are male.
  
  
• In India, agriculture is a highly gender sensitive sector. Almost 75.38% of all women workforce are engaged in agriculture. Within agriculture, 94% of women in crop cultivation are in cereal production and other crops n.e.c., 1.4% in vegetable production and horticulture, while 3.72% are engaged in fruits, nuts, beverages, and spice crops.
  
  
• Foodgrains production draws about 33 percent of its labour from women. Growing of sugarcane and sugar beet draws 25.5 percent of its labour force from women.
  
  
• Animal Husbandry employs 7.03% of women workers who are engaged in agriculture.
  
  
• The Plantation sector is a large employer of women that employs 6.86 percent of the total women force in the agriculture allied activities and fisheries sector employs 0.49 percent of the women.
  
  
• Agriculture, with its low requirement of skills and work which can be more easily combined with work at home, is an easy source of work for women. Many women also work as unpaid family labour. Due to lack of education and training, women who are engaged in agriculture are less able to shift easily to other higher skilled jobs, for example, in the services sector. This makes them dependent on this sector and on its stable growth for survival.
  
  
• As per the NSS Report 2004-05, the involvement of women in various agricultural activities in percentage terms (percentage distribution among women agricultural workers according to activity) is 1.23 percent in ploughing, 4.2 percent in sowing, 6.13 percent in transplanting, 23.82 percent in weeding and 23.64 percent in harvesting and 40.98 percent in other cultivation activities.
  
  
• While gender wage disparity in all these activities is about the same, about 70 percent, activities like ploughing, dominated by men, seem to command the highest level of wages while weeding activities earn the lowest, implying a gap of Rs. 9.46 per day for males. The gap between wages for ploughing earned by males and weeding wages earned by females is Rs. 21.47.
  
  
• In rural areas, women earn about 70 percent of men's wages in terms of both regular and casual wages. Wages also seem to vary significantly by location, education status and age group.
  
  
• Women seldom enjoy property ownership rights directly in their names. Even when women have mutations of land in their names, they may not have actual control over that land. Decision making in cropping patterns, sale, mortgage and the purchase of land or the instruments of production remains in the hands of the men of the household. 

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According to Investing in Women as Drivers of Agricultural Growth by Jacqueline Ashby, Maria Hartl, Yianna Lambrou, Gunnar Larson, Annina Lubbock, Eija Pehu, and Catherine Ragasa, http://www.ifad.org/gender/pub/sourcebook/flyer.pdf:

• Women play a critical role in agricultural production in developing countries. Particularly in low income countries in which agriculture accounts for an average 32 percent of the growth in gross domestic product (GDP), and in which an average 70 percent of the countries' poor live and work in rural areas, women make up a substantial majority of the agricultural workforce and produce most of the food that is consumed locally.
  
  
• The Gender in Agriculture Sourcebook suggest that gender issues are explicitly incorporated into less than 10 percent of official development assistance (ODA) that is directed toward agriculture.
  
  
• Animal diseases cause the loss of about 30 percent of livestock production in developing countries, and women who lack access to credit or information are typically more exposed to risk than male livestock managers.
  
  
• In Andhra Pradesh, India, the organization of over eight million women into self help groups around community procurement centers enabled dispersed commodities to be aggregated and sold, with a cumulative turnover in four years of over $120 million that created jobs for over 10,000 villagers in supply chain management. The income gain on some commodities exceeded 200 percent. Women became active mangers and traders in rural markets and hugely increased their economic and socio-political leverage in households and communities.
  
  
• Gender policy that establishes and trains both women and men to work in teams as front-line staff supporting women producers has proven effective in India's ATMA program and Venezuela's CIARA Foundation.

According to Factsheet: Women Farmers and Food Security, produced by The Hunger Project,

http://www.thp.org/system/files/Factsheet+on+Women+Farmers+and+Food+Security.pdf:

• The FAO estimates that women produce over 50 percent of all food grown worldwide.
  
  
• In sub-Saharan Africa, women grow 80-90 percent of the food.
  
  
• African women work far longer hours than men. On average, their workdays may be 50 percent longer according to the World Bank.
  
  
• Women carry out essential work such as hoeing, planting, weeding and harvesting with simple tools and little outside assistance.
  
  
• In sub-Saharan Africa, when women obtain the same farm inputs as average male farmers, they increase their yields for maize, beans and cowpeas by 22 percent.
  
  
• Despite the critical role they play in food production and management of natural resources, they have ownership of only 1 percent of the land. Lack of access to and control over land has intensified women's difficulties, their access to credit, technical assistance and participation, all essential for development.
  
  
• Agricultural extension strategies traditionally have focused on increasing production of cash crops by providing men with training, information, and access to inputs and services.
  
  
• Women bear the primary responsibility for their families' health, education and nutrition.
  
  
• The Convention on Biodiversity, an international treaty signed by 191 of the world's countries "recognizes the vital role that women play in the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity and affirm[s] the need for the full participation of women at all levels of policy-making and implementation for biological diversity conservation".
  
  
• Rural women, in their role of farmers, are key to maintaining biodiversity. They improve and adapt plant varieties, cultivate plants, and store and exchange seeds.
  
  
• Women are suffering particularly because, in some African countries, women eat last as a cultural tradition, and when there is less food, women are the first to eat less.

According to Agriculture Sector in India,
http://ncw.nic.in/pdfreports/Impact%20of%20WTO%20Women%20in%20Agriculture.pdf:

• The mode of female participation in agricultural production varies with the landowning status of farm households. Their roles range from managers to landless labourers. In over all farm production, women's average contribution is estimated at 55% to 66% of the total labour with percentages, much higher in certain regions. In the Indian Himalayas a pair of bullocks works 1064 hours, a man 1212 hours and a woman 3485 hours in a year on a once hectare farm, a figure that illustrates women's significant contribution to agricultural production.
  
  
• The Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement impacts women's knowledge of and control over seed. The Agreement on Agriculture impacts women's livelihood and income security, and also has secondary impacts in terms of increased violence against women. The sanitary and phyto sanitary agreement has a direct impact on women's expertise and economic role in agroprocessing.
  
  
• According to 1991 census the male cultivators has increased in the country by 11.67 percent from 76.7 million in 1981 to 85.6 million in 1991. The female cultivators however have increased at much faster rate of 45.23 percent from 14.8 million in 1981 to 21.5 million in 1991.
  
  
• 74 percent of the entire female working force is engaged in agriculture operations. About 60 percent of agricultural operations like sowing of seeds, transportation of sapling, winnowing, storage of grain etc are handled exclusively by women, while in other jobs they share the work with women. Apart from participation in actual cultivation, women participate in various forms of processing and marketing of agricultural produce.
  
  
• Female agricultural labours do not enjoy any maternity leave and do not get proper rest after childbirth.
  
  
• About 36.50 percent women work in rural India as cultivators and 43.4 percent as agricultural labours (Census-2001).
  
  
• As men migrate in search of better-paid work, women in rural India are taking over agricultural work in the villages. They face meager wages, long hours, hazardous work and sexual harassment.

According to Characteristics of Sex-Ratio Imbalance in India, and Future Scenarios by Christophe Z Guilmoto (2007), UNFPA,
http://www.unfpa.org/gender/docs/studies/india.pdf:

• Rising sex ratios in India have been recorded since the early 1980s, and have since continued increasing with no sign, so far, of reversing course.
  
  
• From the 1980s, sex-selective abortions became the primary method used to alter the sex composition of children.
  
  
• There has been a gradual increase in the proportion of boys (per 100 girls) from 1981 to 2001, a rise that was significantly faster in urban areas.
  
  
• Sex selection appears to have played a major role in causing the deterioration observed in child sex ratio. Excess female mortality among infants and children contributes only moderately to the deficit of girls.
  
  
• The deterioration of child sex ratio has been observed in a limited number of states, particularly those in the West of the country, stretching from Punjab to Maharashtra.
  
  
• Some religious groups, such as Sikhs or Jains, exhibit extreme sex-ratio values on the whole, while such figures tend to be normal or low among other groups, such as tribal communities.