The plight of women in Iraq today has gone largely ignored, both within Iraqi society and by the international community. For more than five years, headlines have been dominated by political and social turmoil, the chaos of conflict and widespread violence. This has overshadowed the abysmal state of the civilian population's day-to-day lives, a result of that very turmoil and violence.
New research by Oxfam International uncovers a hidden aspect of the global economic crisis – its impact on women workers in developing countries. Preliminary findings from Oxfam's research with women in global supply chains shows that the crisis is having a devastating impact on their livelihoods, their rights, and their families. Women are often first to be laid off, with employers leaving pay outstanding and evading legal obligations to give notice and pay compensation, and governments turning a blind eye, with devastating knock-on effects. Last year, women's wages were putting food on the table and children through school in millions of families. Now, the lives of women who were already suffering from poor labour conditions have become even more precarious.
Topic:
Economics, Gender Issues, Globalization, Political Economy, and Labor Issues
G20 leaders met for the second time in London on 2 April, as the global economic crisis began to crash across the borders of poor countries with ever-greater severity. Oxfam's research shows rising human impacts in the shape of job losses, falling remittances to the families of migrant workers and a particularly severe impact on women workers in global supply chains. Based on the latest forecasts, published on the eve of the summit, Oxfam estimates that the crisis could push 100 million people into poverty in 2009 alone.
Topic:
Economics, Gender Issues, Globalization, International Organization, Poverty, and Labor Issues
The international response to SGBV in Liberia – in spite of having been touted as one of the great success stories in implementing UNSC resolution 1325 by the UN and the Liberian government – has so far at best been misguided.
The purpose of this paper is to analyze social and political features of women among members of European Parliament during its Sixth legislature. Beyond statistics aggregation, we will try to adopt a comparative perspective which includes three dimensions. The first one is historical. How can we understand evolutions in the composition of this sample? The second is cross-cutting and focuses on differences between women and men and evolutions of those diverging patterns. The third dimension attempts to analyze structural oppositions between national delegations on the path to feminization. Together, these interrogations will allow us to discuss general patterns of women's presence at the European Parliament after the 2004 and 2007 Eastern enlargements. The paper is based upon quantitative and qualitative data collected within the framework of a long-term sociological study of MEPs conducted at the University of Strasbourg.
Topic:
Civil Society, Gender Issues, Political Economy, and Politics
A new research field named “gender studies” or “feminist studies” has emerged during the 1990s in East-European and post-Soviet countries. The scientific productions in that field often function as experts' studies and aim at contributing to improve women's condition. Established by agents who simultaneously act in several social spaces (scientific, associative or political), feminist studies are at the crossroads of academic and activist, national and international dynamics. Therefore, we consider them as a new discipline at the core of the social and political programmes of recomposition after the collapse of communist regimes, and as an indicator for the rebuilding of social sciences, the emergence of new academic topics, the international circulation and importation of scientific concerns, the reconstruction of intellectual elites in the Countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CCEE). The paper offers some guidelines for a sociology of this new field of knowledge production.
Topic:
Cold War, Communism, Democratization, Gender Issues, and Political Theory
Kyrgyzstan's increasingly authoritarian government is adopting a counter-productive approach to the country's growing radicalisation. Instead of tackling the root causes of a phenomenon that has seen increasing numbers, including many women, joining groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), it is resorting to heavy-handed police methods that risk pushing yet more Kyrgyz towards radicalism. The authorities view HT, which describes itself as a revolutionary party that aims to restore by peaceful means the caliphate that once ruled the Muslim world, as a major security threat. But for some men and ever more women, it offers a sense of identity and belonging, solutions to the day-to-day failings of the society they live in, and an alternative to what they widely view as the Western-style social model that prevails in Kyrgyzstan. Without a major effort to tackle endemic corruption and economic failure, radical ranks are likely to swell, while repression may push at least some HT members into violence. This report focuses primarily on the increasingly important role that women are playing in the movement.
Department of Economics and Business, Colorado College
Abstract:
The recent stagnation of electronic commerce highlights the need to understand contemporary online consumer behavior. This study incorporates current user demographics and emerging Internet activities to dynamically model the determinants of two key measurements of recent online shopping, a purchase within the last year and the novel dependent variable, percentage of income spent online in the last three months. Logistic regression is applied to a nationally representative 2007 survey of the U.S. online population. Determinants of a recent online purchase include, ownership of a credit card, an online payment account (PayPalTM), listening to podcasts, participating in online auctions, and for the first time, female gender. In a second regression, positive determinants for the percentage of income spent online include male gender, educational attainment, online auctions, instant messenging and online dating. Online spending increases with time online and appears to compete with other forms of online entertainment and social networking.
Topic:
Economics, Gender Issues, Markets, and Science and Technology
Women represent the great majority of the world's poor. With this poverty comes a range of well-documented problems: low educational attainment; low income and earning potential; inferior social power, status and influence compared with men; and importantly, poor health outcomes for both women and their children. High rates of maternal mortality and morbidity remain apparently intractable problems in many countries, particularly developing countries. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that every minute, at least one woman dies from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth; and 20 more suffer injury, infection or disease.
Topic:
Gender Issues, Health, Treaties and Agreements, and United Nations