Theme
The twenty-first century is the women’s century and will build on the progress made over the last hundred years. The “short” twentieth century (1914- 1991) confirmed the importance of the condition of women, which, little by little, has claimed centre stage and has proved to be a major conquest. Since 1902, when the Hague Convention adopted international standards to protect women in the context of marriage, divorce and child custody, the road has been long and controversial. A few years later, the League of Nations, the precursor of the United Nations Organization, adopted measures to promote the role of woman. This was a time when, in most countries, women were denied the right to vote, hold office and participate in political life. The United Nations Charter was the first international agreement to establish gender equality as an inalienable human right.
Many barriers to women’s emancipation fell away as a natural consequence of the onset of the Second World War. In all countries, both men and women suffered as a result of the conflict, but the brunt of the impact of war on the civilian population was borne by women and children.
Starting from the “short century” of feminism, emancipation and “inalienable” women’s rights, the “other half” of the world went on the ascent, seeking to govern economic, political and social processes, winning over extensive areas of power, and imposing new forms of sensitivity and new ways of being and thinking.
Mao Tse-Tung’s famous phrase – “Women hold up half the sky” – has now become a material precept, a tangible objective, day in day out, of millions of women who are increasingly defining the way things will be done in future: women as entrepreneurs and professional people, intellectuals, scientists, managers, mothers and daughters are the future opinion leaders and decision-makers.
Battles are won and lost. Gender equality is still a utopia, and male supremacy and power dominate both in the family and in social relations in many countries. At the same time, women have acquired roles of prestige in areas of traditional male dominance particularly with regard to some of the most controversial issues of postmodernity: the environment, civil, political and biological rights, and social governance.
Women make up half of the world’s population and their full involvement in society would be beneficial to all. In the economic field, empirical research has demonstrated that women and girls work harder than men, invest their savings for their children and take responsibility for their families. When women manage to achieve a greater share of power in the organisation of the community and society, many things will change, including demographic trends with significant consequences for economic growth and environmental sustainability.
Gender inequality limits development, because it compromises the possibility of rising above the poverty level and therefore jeopardizes sustainable growth. Thus, an improvement in the condition of women is a sine qua non for more effective development policies.
However, the path to emancipation is still long and laborious. In various countries of Africa, Southern Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, one girl in four marries before her fifteenth birthday. In many regions, women receive less information than men, and have less control over the processes of decision-making and over family resources.
The twenty-first century, nevertheless, will be the women’s century, because there is a new awareness of gender rights among the world’s decision-makers – be they men or women. The Millennium Development Goals approved by the world leaders in the year 2000 focused on empowering women through specific objectives such as dignified employment for women, promoting gender equality and women’s autonomy, and improving maternal health. The United Nations Security Council adopted a watershed resolution that emphasized the need to ensure that women are empowered to play a more participatory role in solving conflicts and in peace-building efforts.
Also in the poorer and more depressed areas of the globe, women can and must play a forceful role in the pursuit of peace, development and emancipation both for themselves and for men. In sub-Saharan Africa, the education gap between men and women is due to factors hindering the access to schooling and making it difficult or impossible for girls to go on attending school owing mainly to the cultural norms existing in the different ethnic groupings. In South-East Asia, the lack of resources invested by parents in their daughters’ education has a significant impact on their school attendance rates. In Latin America and the Caribbean, governments have accorded priority to the problems of women in their overall planning, but have only rarely defined specific equal-opportunity policies and tangible strategies for their implementation. Women’s empowerment, training and education, then, are essential conditions for solving the most widespread and pressing historical problems of the underdeveloped countries, such as population control, the struggle against malnutrition and the modernization of the economy.
All human development and human rights issues have gender dimensions. To address these issues in a more systematic way, in July 2010 the world leadership created UN Women, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women.
Women are furnishing far-sighted, alternative and wise solutions to the major challenges faced by humankind. In the economy, the arts, literature and the cinema, in the information sector and in the management of society in general, women are opening up new horizons, achieving prestigious goals in terms of power and charisma.
In presenting this analysis, the 2011 Conference of the Pio Manzù Centre seeks to build on the efforts of the international community and proposes new targets for reflection on the part of the many-faceted universe of contemporary men’s and women’s thought, inviting experts and decision makers to come up with projects and pointers for the future capable of enhancing and enriching the vitally important work afoot in the field of gender thinking: the development of gender culture, not as a form of separatism between man and woman, but as a synthesis of unity in diversity.