The Changing Role of Women in Society A women's role has changed tremendously and is making its greatest impact in our society today. Many years ago, women's contribution to society was limited and controlled by men. Women are standing tall and are playing a major role in many important areas Women are advancing in the workplace, but women of color still lag behind Gender & Society, essay. The history of women’s work and wages and how it has created success for us all Dec 20, · In this context it is useful also to compare the ratios of women in American and Indian legislatures. In the US House of Representatives the proportion of women is percent, while in the present and the last lower houses of the Indian Parliament, women’s proportions have been respectively and percent
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This piece is part of 19A: The Brookings Gender Equality Series, women in society essay. In women in society essay essay series, Brookings scholars, public officials, and other subject-area experts examine the current state of gender equality years after the 19th Amendment was adopted to the U.
Constitution and propose recommendations to cull the prevalence of gender-based discrimination in the United States and around the world. As the United States reduces its military presence in Afghanistan while the Taliban remain strong on the battlefield, and while peace negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban have commenced, a massive question mark hangs over the fate of Afghan women and their rights.
The deal that the United States signed with the Taliban in Doha on February 29,leaves the future of Afghan women completely up to the outcomes of the intra-Taliban negotiations and battlefield developments.
In exchange for the withdrawal of its forces by summerthe United States only received assurances from the Taliban that the militants would not attack U. How Afghanistan and its political order is redesigned is left fully up to the negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government and other Afghan politicians, powerbrokers, and—hopefully—representatives of Afghan civil society. But there are strong reasons to be believe that the fate of Afghan women, particularly urban Afghan women from middle- and upper-class families who benefited by far the most from the post order, will worsen.
But it is hardly zero. And so the U, women in society essay. must exercise whatever leverage it has remaining to preserve the rights and protect the needs of Afghan women. Long gone are the days when the George W. Long gone are the days of the Barack Obama administration when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the preconditions for U.
And, amidst COVID, violence on the battlefield has only intensified as the Taliban relentlessly and steadily pound Afghan forces. Though originally expected for March, formal negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban finally started in September.
The Afghan government has appointed a member negotiating team that includes five Afghan women. Out of 46 appointed members only nine are womenwhile former warlords and older male powerbrokers dominate the list. The women appointed to the two government bodies are urban, educated women, some of whom held government positions and others who are members of civil society. They are to represent all Afghan women.
These women have consistently spoken out against Taliban abuses and strongly oppose any return to political arrangements that would significantly weaken the rights of Afghan women.
Afghans expect them to oppose constitutional and social changes that would significantly reduce the formal rights that Afghan women obtained over the past two decades. However, at least some rural Women in society essay women do not feel connected to such elite urban women nor do they believe that urban elite women necessarily speak for them.
Moreover, will these women representatives carry sufficient weight? Nonetheless, the Afghan government, strongly displeased with the deal the United States signed with the Taliban and dreading the prospect of the withdrawal of U.
Meanwhile, the Afghan government continually seeks to delay and avoid negotiations with the Taliban, hoping that the United States will reverse itself and agree to either retain forces in Afghanistan for years to come or, ideally, deploy them to fight the Taliban. But whether these hopes of the Afghan government materialize—and even if they do—whether they translate into actual empowerment of Afghan women is a huge question.
It will also depend on how long negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban drag onand how badly weakened women in society essay Afghan security forces and the Afghan government become.
At least some Afghan powerbrokers are open to such explorations. Many Afghan women, particularly those in urban areas, have much to lose from a bad intra-Afghan deal. During the s, the Taliban not only brutally imposed social restrictions on women such as mandatory burqa coverings, but, more fundamentally and deleteriously, restricted their access to health care, education, and jobs.
It prohibited women from appearing in public spaces without a male chaperon, de facto sentencing widows and their children to starvation. The Taliban regime destroyed Afghan institutions and the economy, which was already devastated by decades of fighting and the Soviet scorched-earth counterinsurgency strategy.
The resulting immiseration critically affected women and children. And, with the exception of poppy cultivation and opium harvestingthe Taliban prohibited women from holding jobs, including working as doctors for other women.
The post-Taliban constitution in gave Afghan women all kinds of rights, and the post-Taliban political dispensation brought social and economic growth that significantly improved their socio-economic condition.
From a collapsed health care system with essentially no medical services available to women during the Taliban years, the post-Taliban regime constructed 3, functional health facilities bygiving 87 percent of Afghan people access to a medical facility within two hours distance—at least in theory, because intensifying Taliban, militia, and criminal violence has made travel on roads increasingly unsafe, women in society essay.
Infewer than 10 percent of girls were enrolled in primary schools; bywomen in society essay, that number had grown to 33 percent 4 —not enough, but progress still—while female enrollment in secondary education grew from six percent in to 39 percent in By21 percent of Afghan civil servants were women compared with almost none during the Taliban years16 percent of them in senior management levels; and 27 percent of Afghan members of parliament were women.
Yet these gains for women have been distributed highly unequally, with the increases far greater for women in urban areas. For many rural women, particularly in Pashtun areas but also among other rural minority ethnic groups, actual life has not changed much from the Taliban era, formal legal empowerment notwithstanding.
They are still fully dependent on men in their families for permission to access health care, attend school, and work. Many Afghan men remain deeply conservative. Typically, families allow their girls to have a primary or secondary education—usually up to puberty—and then will proceed with arranged marriages. Even if a young woman is granted permission to attend a university by her male guardian, her father or future husband may not permit her to work after graduation. Without any prodding from the Taliban, most Afghan women in rural areas are fully covered with the burqa.
Loss of husbands, brothers, and fathers to the fighting generates not only psychological trauma for them, but also fundamentally jeopardizes their economic survival and ability to go about everyday life.
Widows and their children are thus highly vulnerable to a panoply of debilitating disruptions due to the loss of family men. Not surprisingly, the position of Afghan women toward peace varies greatly. Educated urban women reject the possibility of another Taliban emirate. Rather than yielding to the Taliban, some urban women may prefer for fighting to go on, particularly as urban areas are much less affected by the warfare than are rural areas, and their male relatives, particularly of elite families, rarely bear the battlefield fighting risks.
For them, the continuation and augmentation of war has been far less costly than for many rural women. By contrast, as interviews with Afghan women conducted by one of us in the fall of and the summer of showed, peace is an absolute priority for some rural women, even women in society essay peace deal very much on the Taliban terms.
The Taliban already frequently rule or influence the areas where they live anyway. While rejecting a s-like lockdown of women in their homes that the Taliban imposed, many rural women point out that in that period the Taliban also reduced sexual predation and robberies that debilitated their lives.
A recent study by UN Women and partners showed that only 15 percent of Afghan men think women should be allowed to work outside of their home after marriage, and two thirds of men complain Afghan women now have too many women in society essay. Male Afghan political powerbrokers often resent quotas for women in public shuras assemblies and elections such as for parliament, where 27 percent of seats are reserved for women, women in society essay.
The UN study also revealed that 80 percent of Afghan women experience domestic violence. Others have been prosecuted for killing their brutally abusive husbandsincluding in self-defense. Currently, there women in society essay no realistic prospect of the Afghan government defeating the Taliban. There is also little reason to believe women in society essay even an open-ended American military commitment to Afghanistan, including a new significant increase in U.
forces, can significantly weaken the Taliban, let alone defeat them. If a prolonged and bloody civil war can be avoided through negotiations, the Taliban will most likely become a significant actor in the Afghan government. It is conceivable that the Taliban could become the dominant and most powerful actor women in society essay a future Afghan government. The Taliban already rule significant parts of the country — indeed much of the countryside—and determine, sometimes in negotiations with local communities, what local life is like, women in society essay, including what freedoms women have or do not have.
Thus, the Taliban inevitably will shape in significant ways the rights and existence of Afghan women. Almost always, it means mandated codes of dress and behavior. Women in society essay, sharia systems compete with formal legal systems within a country, even as the latter can also be informed by sharia. Some of the Taliban interlocutors suggested during the fall of interviews 11 that in a future Afghanistan, with the Taliban in control or sharing power as they imagine will be the outcomewomen could still hold ministerial positions, though a woman could never be the head of state or government.
First, many Taliban tell their interlocutors what they want to hear—giving different messages to Western diplomats, journalists, and researchers; Afghan powerbrokers or Afghan society in general; and their rank and file. Second, there may women in society essay be little agreement among members of Taliban leadership shurasand between them and mid-level military commanders, as to what any kind of peace should look like regarding a variety of social and political arrangements, women in society essay, including the roles, freedoms, and restrictions on women.
Thus, Taliban leaders and spokesmen prefer to leave crucial elements vague, hoping first that they will be able to negotiate power division in the country, ideally becoming the dominant government actor, and only then worry about the details of social and women in society essay rules. On the ground today, Taliban rule varies significantly among local Taliban military commanders and shadow district governors and their views.
In some places, it includes the same old brutalities, such as whipping women for sex outside of marriage, stoning them to death for certain offenses, and punishment for not wearing a burqa. Elsewhere, the Taliban are more permissive. But a loosening of restrictions may not, in fact, arrive should formal Taliban rule emerge at the national level; rather, the opposite is likely.
The Taliban may be trying simply to obfuscate their restrictive inclinations while strengthening their hold on local communities. At the same time, the Taliban have moderated their behavior after defeating the uprisings against their rule that started in the city of Ghazni in and for two years spread across the country. The Taliban smashed the uprisings, keenly prioritizing a military pushback against them and often killing all males in villages involved in the anti-Taliban fight.
But since crushing the uprisings, the Taliban have stopped shutting down primary schools in many women in society essay, including in Ghazni and Helmand Provinces. They now allow, women in society essay, at least, pre-pubescent girls to attend school.
Rather than shutting down the schools, they send representatives to ensure schools do not teach anything the Taliban disapprove of. Clearly, censorship of education is most problematic, but having some education—even if it is merely basic literacy and numeracy in addition to Koranic instruction—is preferable to no education at all. Moreover, Taliban representatives also make sure that teachers actually show up in classrooms instead of tending to other jobs, as they often do in government-controlled or militarily-contested areas.
In many areas, the Women in society essay no longer prohibit government clinics, electricity delivery, women in society essay other government services—it taxes them instead. This also guarantees that resources are not stolen via corruption and theft and punishes clinic operators for not having adequate supplies of medicines. How the Taliban relate to women in an area is often negotiated with the community.
Women in society essay, for one of us who commanded U. and allied forces in Afghanistan, it was only here, women in society essay, in the administration of swift, un-corrupt justice, where the Taliban could compete with the Afghan government.
The Taliban could not provide fresh water or electricity or any civil services, but the Taliban could provide near-instantaneous sharia-based justice that sometimes served the best interests of both Afghan women and men and ended disputes and violence.
The question is, how much and in what ways? Such a focus is not merely a humanitarian imperative. primary interests in the country because women are vectors of both peace and economic progress in Afghanistan. and international aid. An exodus of Afghan women from the country or their lockup in family compounds will only augment the stagnation and violence dynamics in the country. For example, the United States can insist that statutorily denying women in society essay access to health care and primary and secondary education, prohibiting women from appearing outside of a household without a male relative, or in a blanket manner disqualifying women from jobs would disqualify an Afghan government from U.
The United States should also make clear that women in society essay in the absence of statutory prohibitions, a systematic failure to uphold minimal rights would disqualify Afghanistan or a part of it from the majority of U. economic and humanitarian assistance. The United States should also insist that those who violate the basic rights of Afghan women as they are defined by the Afghan constitution, or as set by minimal international human right standards, such as by committing murder, lynching, women in society essay, and grievous domestic violence against women, are brought to justice, prosecuted, women in society essay, and imprisoned.
Even as it draws down its military presence, the United States—and its allies in Afghanistan—is not powerless.
Women’s role in society - Stephanie Lamb - TEDxYouth@StPeterPort
, time: 8:55Women: Essay on The Position of Women in India
Dec 24, · Women Empowerment Essay 2 ( Words) The term women empowerment is used to indicate steps taken to improve the status of women in society and diminishing all the existing gender differences. In a wider sense, it includes economical and social empowerment of women by taking a number of policy measures Dec 20, · In this context it is useful also to compare the ratios of women in American and Indian legislatures. In the US House of Representatives the proportion of women is percent, while in the present and the last lower houses of the Indian Parliament, women’s proportions have been respectively and percent The Subjection of Women is an essay by English philosopher, political economist and civil servant John Stuart Mill published in , with ideas he developed jointly with his wife Harriet Taylor blogger.com submitted the finished manuscript of their collaborative work On Liberty () soon after her untimely death in late , and then continued work on The Subjection of Women until its
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