Feminism's global challenge: With one voice | Society | The Observer

This Tuesday, International Women's Day will focus our attention on the struggle that millions still face against injustice and discrimination. In an impassioned essay, Mariella Frostrup argues that the fight for women's rights is far from over

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• • Mariella Frostrup
  • The Observer, Sunday 6 March 2011
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Mariella with Darfuri refugees from camps in Chad. Some women are raped daily when they venture out to gather firewood to cook. Photograph: Jason Mccue for the Observer

In the western world the greatest triumph of spin in the last century is reflected in attitudes to feminism. Our struggle for emancipation and equality has been surreptitiously rewritten as a harpy bra-burning contest while elsewhere, in less affluent parts of the world, the response is altogether different. From Mozambique to Chad, South Africa and Liberia, Sierra Leone to Burkina Faso, feminism is the buzzword for a generation of women determined to change the course of the future for themselves and their families. At female gatherings all over sub-Saharan Africa you'll find enthusiasm and eager signatories to the cause.

Not, they're quick to point out, that they're fans of the strident man bashing we enthusiastically took part in during feminism's second wave. Theirs is a quiet, dignified and entirely implacable determination to make equality not just an aspiration but a reality, in the areas of life where it most counts, from government to enterprise. And they're achieving it, too. Under the banner of Gender is My Agenda, with the encouragement of the African Union, which has named this the Decade of African Women, small women's groups across the African continent are coming together to lobby, draw strength, learn leadership and conflict-negotiating skills and support each other in creating and sustaining small businesses.

Women's role in conflict resolution was highlighted in Liberia, first in ending the bloody reign of Charles Taylor and then in electing the first ever female African president, the recent Nobel Peace prize nominee Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. Johnson-Sirleaf has also this year won the coveted African Gender Award for helping poor women send children to school and for developing a female enterprise fund. In neighbouring Rwanda, women now outnumber men in parliament (by 52% to 48% men).

Conversely, in the UK there are more blokes called Dave and Nick in government than there are women MPs. Women continue to hover at a steady 19% in the chamber, put off perhaps by a testosterone-fuelled climate where the last two prime ministers' wives have given up high- flying careers to support their husbands or simply to satisfy the perceived demands of middle England. Meanwhile, deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, instead of receiving praise, was drowned in a chorus of derision for attempting a degree of shared parenting with his working wife Miriam.

In the face of such continuing inequities, do a straw poll in a room full of modern Brits and you'll find that those willing to commit to the F word are few and far between. But, Top Gear presenters aside, I wonder if members of either sex actually disagree with what feminism set out to achieve, which is the social, economic and political equality of the sexes (see any definition for confirmation of those goals). Better yet, it's a battle we've all but won. Time for a pat on the back to all concerned, and special thanks to Emmeline Pankhurst, Germaine Greer and the rest.

The myth of equality, or near enough, was one I fell for like so many others until I was asked to participate in a debate at the Royal Geographical Society a few years ago. "We're All Feminists Now" asserted the motion – and faced with the literary might of the likes of Howard Jacobson and Tim Lott I was initially struck dumb, fearing it was going to be a tough challenge to argue the opposite. A quick Google put me straight. Two-thirds of children denied school are girls, 64% of the world's illiterate adults are women, 41m girls are still denied a primary education, 75% of civilians killed in war are women and children, causing Major-General Patrick Cammaert, the former UN peacekeeping commander in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to declare in 2008: "It is now more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in modern conflict."

These are staggering statistics, and yet not powerful enough to make arguing for women's rights a respectable pursuit, rather than the aggressive histrionics of popular perception. International Women's Day, the one day a year when we're encouraged to celebrate what we've achieved and highlight what still needs to be done, conjures less bile than the F word, but also more apathy. When women are allowed to vote, work, choose when to have babies and dress in whatever fashion pleases them, what on earth do they need their own day for as well?

The fact that 700,000 people will experience domestic violence in the UK, and 90% of them are white British females, that there are sex slaves imported daily to this country who live lives of abject terror, that equal pay is still not a reality nearly four decades after the act enshrining it was passed, that the conviction rate in rape cases still hovers around 6.5%, that only 12% of the UK's boardroom seats (as compared to Norway's 32%) are occupied by women, are just a small smattering of reasons why women's rights should remain a priority even here in the UK.

Further afield, the positive impact that gender equality can and is beginning to make in the developing world can't be underestimated. Recent research from the International Food Policy Research Unit finds that equalising women's status would lower child malnutrition by 13% – that's 13.4 million children – in South Asia and by 3% (1.7 million children) in sub-Saharan Africa. That's a lot of lives to save by just doing what's right.

Saving women's lives in childbirth and protecting them from HIV infection must remain a priority, but if those women have no rights or opportunities, you are also sentencing them to a life of unadulterated hardship. Yet try to tell the stories of the inspirational groups of feisty femmes currently creating havoc with the status quo in the developing world, or make a programme highlighting the quantifiable difference to a country's GDP that comes with educating girls, or celebrate the small business women across Africa who keep that continent alive, and interest evaporates.

My email to the BBC requesting some form of support for International Women's Day didn't get a reply. You could be forgiven for thinking that, in this country, what matters to women is still not considered a priority. Instead, people ask why there isn't an International Men's Day – the only response to that being that it happens on the other 364 days of the year. I'm not being dismissive, but continuing my quick perusal of feminism's failures across the globe makes the need to carry on shouting from a soapbox pretty clear.

Gender-based violence causes more deaths and disabilities among women aged 15 to 44 than cancer, malaria, traffic accidents and war. Basically it's safer to spend Friday nights chain smoking on the M1 with a bag of Congolese mosquitoes, in fog, than to be a woman in large swathes of the world. It's not possible to have a daughter (as I do) and ignore the fact that every year, 60 million girls are sexually assaulted at or en route to school. One in five women will become a victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime. One in four women will be a victim of domestic violence in her lifetime – many of these on a number of occasions. Women who experience violence are up to three times more likely to acquire HIV. Indeed, it is now among women and children, not the men spreading it, that Aids is most prevalent. Among national governments, 29% lack laws or policies to prevent violence against women. Women hold only 19% of the world's parliamentary seats, perfectly echoed in our own chamber. Have you had enough yet? I certainly had.

Rage is a powerful motivating force, I discovered, and I decided to see for myself what was happening out there. I visited Internally Displaced Peoples camps in Chad where women refugees from Darfur were being raped daily when they ventured out to gather firewood so they could cook for their children. In Mozambique I cried frustrated tears as the 12 women farmers gathered around me raised their hands in shame and in unison to indicate that every one of them was a victim of domestic violence, a crime they were campaigning to have outlawed. And yes, this was only last year.

So forgive me if I struggle to find sexist jokes funny in a country where sex slavery is on the rise and 16- and 17-year-old girls from countries around the world have been abducted, raped and forced into prostitution. Though I might chuckle a bit if those jokes were being told by a Bangladeshi businesswoman celebrating her daughter's Cambridge degree… Is it triumphalist to applaud when a woman over 50 takes on the discriminatory ageism of a giant corporation and wins, as in the case of TV presenter Miriam O'Reilly? And we are the lucky ones, living in a society where the possibility of justice, if not always the reality of it, exists.

There are women all over the world to whom the bounty of our lives is utterly unimaginable. Until a couple of years ago I was guilty, as many of us are, of charity fatigue. I just couldn't be bothered to wear one more T-shirt, donate one more item of clothing, go to one more carol concert or buy one more charity record. Until the extent of the greatest crime of the 21st century, a crime being perpetrated against millions of my fellow women denied even basic human rights, became too much to bear.

That's why a group of us set up Great – the Gender Rights and Equality Action Trust. That's why individuals like Annie Lennox and President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf became active patrons. But it's not just "sisters that are doing it". Bono and Damon Albarn have joined our ranks – this is not a women's issue any longer; this is a human issue. There's a new wave of support sweeping from the developed to the developing world through women joining forces and rolling up their sleeves to lend a hand. Weareequals.org is a coalition of NGOs large and small, which have joined forces to pursue gender equality as a tool for economic empowerment. Countries where girls are educated and women play their part in government are places where peace reigns and economies begin to flourish, and women are more interested in ending wars than starting them – there are endless statistics that prove this to be the reality.

The emancipation of women is the only possible future for the developing world, as it was and continues to be for us. There are too many people on this planet for us to be able to afford to leave nearly 50% of them in penury, uneducated and without a voice. Making women equal partners makes sense for both sexes. My profound hope is that we can, men and women alike, work together to create the circumstances in which International Women's Day can become the cause for celebration it should be. Once that's been achieved we'll work on creating that International Men's Day, too – promise.For more information about Great, go to thegreatinitiative.com

Mariella Frostrup is a TV presenter and Observer columnist

via guardian.co.uk