Introduction

The current wave of globalization has greatly improved the lives of women worldwide, particularly in the developing world. Nevertheless, women remain disadvantaged in many areas of life, including education, employment, health, and rights.  According to the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Bank, 57 percent of the 72 million primary school aged children who do not attend school are females. Additionally, females are 4 percent less likely to complete primary school than are boys.¹ 

Roughly 529,000 mothers – or one every minute – die each year in childbirth;² according to BBC World News, 95 percent of the 529,000 childbirth deaths occurred in Africa or Asia in 2000.³ An African woman, for instance, faces a 1 in 16 chance of dying in childbirth in her lifetime, while in the United States, the chance is 1 in 2,500.

The UN’s Millennium Development Goals therefore prioritize gender equality and empowerment of women. As part of the Millennium Goals, the international community, especially the UN, will monitor indicators of gender equality such as levels of female enrollment at school, participation in the workplace, and representation in decision-making positions and political institutions.

Two key international declarations form the basis for this agenda. As part of its “Decade for Women,” the UN published the Nairobi Forward-Looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women in 1985 with the purpose of creating a blueprint for global action to achieve women’s equality by the year 2000. Ten years later, the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995 issued the Beijing Platform for Action aimed to update and invigorate the world community’s commitment to gender equality.

These international conferences and documents have served to crystallize the understanding of the unique problems women face worldwide and to promote efforts to address them. More recently, means to monitor the progress of both have been implemented. Other, similar documents deal with specific challenges to women’s rights. For example, the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women vows to guarantee women equal rights with men in all spheres of life, including education, employment, health care, suffrage, nationality, and marriage.

This Issue Brief will examine the effects of globalization on women worldwide, namely on their participation in the economy, representation in the political process, education, health, and sexual slavery. It also will discuss perhaps globalization’s greatest benefits to women in the internationalization of the movement for gender equality, and the legal structure that supports this goal and recognizes women’s rights as basic human rights.