There is a country where the leading cause of death of pregnant women is murder by a partner. In this same country, more than a million women were raped in 2008 and women are much more likely to live in poverty than men. Local laws don’t protect their right to bodily freedom and integrity; some rape laws even state that once a woman initially consents to sex, she doesn’t have the right to change her mind.
You may have caught on by now — yes, I’m talking about the United States.
This week marked the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, a sobering reminder that even though the United States likes to think of itself as a global leader, we’re woefully behind other countries when it comes to women’s rights and well-being. In a 2010 report from the World Economic Forum on the Global Gender Gap, the United States didn’t even make the top 10 of the 134 countries studied. (When it comes to wage equality, we were pathetically in 64th place.)
Amnesty International reports that U.S women have a higher risk of dying of pregnancy complications than women in 49 other countries. (African-American women are almost four times as likely to die as white women.) In fact, the increase in maternal mortality in 2010 made it more dangerous for women in to give birth in California than it is in Kuwait or Bosnia.
For all of our rhetoric about respecting mothers and parenthood, the United States is the only industrialized nation without paid maternity leave, putting families and children at severe economic risk. Some families pay as much as half their income toward child care costs.
The United States also is one of a handful of countries that have refused to ratify the United Nations’ Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, along with Iran, Somalia and Sudan.
Too many Americans think the work of the women’s movement is done — that women are equal, the battles have been won and we can pack up our picket signs and go home. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Even though abortion is legal in the United States, it can be difficult to obtain. A full 85 percent of U.S. counties have no doctors who perform abortions, while state restrictions — from waiting periods to parental consent — make it difficult for many American women to access this legal procedure. Some laws have become downright draconian: One House bill would make it legal for hospitals to deny women lifesaving abortions and new bills introduced in South Dakota, Iowa and Nebraska actually would make it legal to kill abortion providers.
Rape and sexual assault are at epidemic levels. U.S. women serving in the military are more likely to be sexually assaulted by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire; Native American women are 2.5 times more likely to be raped than U.S. women in general; and rapes on college campuses continue to go unnoticed and unpunished — 95 percent of sexual assaults on campuses are never reported. And while countries like Sweden make it a crime to continue having sex with an unwilling partner, some U.S. states say that once a woman says yes, she can’t change her mind.
And despite all the media coverage of the “mancession,” a report just released by the National Women’s Law Center shows that since the 2010 pickup in job growth, women have filled fewer than 5 percent of new positions.
This isn’t to say American women haven’t made gains or that there aren’t plenty of other women across the world who are worse off — obviously, that’s not the case. A report released from the White House on women’s progress, for example, shows that women are outpacing men when it comes to education. But what does a degree matter if we’re still going to get hired less, paid less and promoted less often? And just because we’ve made progress, it doesn’t mean we stop the fight.
If the United States really is a country that leads, a nation that paves the way for women across the world, then let’s start by addressing the hard work that needs to be done at home.