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. For example, the Center for Global Development estimates that 43 million primary age girls are not enrolled in school. In only 18 countries in the world do women hold even one-third of seats in the legislature. Five hundred thousand  women die in pregnancy or childbirth each year. An African woman, for instance, faces a 1 in 16 chance of dying in childbirth in her lifetime, while in the industrialized world, the chance is 1 in 2,800.

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.

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 guarantees 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.