It’s too late for sorry. The United Nations’ failing attempts to achieve their Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are unrealistic as gender inequality continues to exist amidst the rapidly approaching 2015 deadline.
Experts at the 4th Asia Pacific Conference on Reproductive and Sexual Health and Rights have estimated that there are 163 million women ‘missing’ in the Asia-Pacific region.
Therefore, with one of the main objectives of the MDGs being to promote gender equality, the overlying question here is how does the international community expect to empower women when there aren’t any to begin with?
But where have all these girls gone? The answer to this mind-boggling question can be best explained by studies commissioned by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). According to their research, millions of women have gone missing as result of modern gender determination techniques and selective abortions. Countries that have been contributing to the skewed sex ratios at birth (SRB) are the likes of
However, the most disturbing part of this whole ordeal is that initiatives enacted to mediate the problem have only been addressed as a result of the MDGs in 2000. But, knowledge of this ‘gendercide’ had been presented to the international community two decades ago in 1980.
In the late 1980s, Nobel Prize laureate Dr. Amartya Sen coined the term ‘missing women’ to describe the great numbers of women in the world who are literally not alive due to family neglect and discrimination. He estimated that in 1980, there were 100 million women missing, of which 50 million were accounted for in
Since Sen’s studies in the late 80s, experts have asserted that women are missing in
So then, the only question left to answer is why girls are being discriminated against. After all, biologically, females are stronger and tend to live longer than males. Unfortunately, the answer to this question is hard for people like us – citizens living in a developed country – to fully understand. The logic behind gendercide derives from social implications. Particularly in poverty stricken nations, the female gender is typically seen as less productive in terms of contributing to a family’s household income. By being less desirable, boys are seen as essential because they are physically stronger and can work laborious jobs that flood the labor markets of less developed countries (LDCs).
Therefore, current actions taken up by the international community has come extremely late with respects to the MDGs. Having known about the gendercide since Sen’s studies in the 1980s, progress towards reaching key goals of equality and empowering women is highly improbable especially with the millions already ‘missing’ and the 2015 deadline just beyond the horizon.
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2 comments:
I did a research paper a year or so ago about the one-child rule in China... millions of females are being left for dead as families strongly prefer a male offspring to provide for the family in the future. truly a sad story, and there is very little that anyone outside of the Chinese government can do about it.
This is very tragic, is there anything that people outside of the Chinese government can do to change the trend that this society has taken in not letting females be born and develop into women. By many places in southeast asia only permitting one offspring to be born to each couple it creates a social idea that the family should only keep the child that will bring more money in and unfortunately in these societies it is often males.
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