Progress of the World's Women Report:

[the_future_modernes]

UN Women releases first report: Progress of the World’s Women

The newly created organization within the UN, UN Women, led by former president of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, (Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director) dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women which was established to accelerate progress on meeting the rights of girls and women worldwide, has released their first report yesterday, Progress of the World’s Women.
The report can be downloaded here (link goes to PDF file) and the facts sheets (also in PDF format) are available here.
In the interest of brevity for this post (and you will notice that brevity has not been achieved given the amount of data I went through), I have specifically gone through the fact sheets and not focused on the overall report. I might collate the data in the report itself (which deals with specific cases and studies in each region) for a future post.

Now, a couple of observations: to start with, I am particularly upset that the rights and issues specific to trans* folks are nowhere mentioned in these reports. Not even once. I suspect this is because the UN, in its need for consensus among member States, sometimes invisibilizes certain issues so as not to irritate the governments of those countries who are adamant about recognizing the need for work/ improvement/ change in certain areas (or even acknowledge the mere existence of certain issues). Still, a global report about the state of gender equality and women’s rights that doesn’t address the gross inequalities and discriminations faced by trans* folks is an incomplete one. The same applies to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Queer folks. Not mentioned at all in these reports.

And second, I’d like to invite readers to see through this data with a critical eye, if anything because I believe that it does away with the notions usually portrayed in mass media of certain areas of the world (namely, those in the Global South) depicted purely as backwards, oppressive regions where nothing good ever comes out. If anything, I think this report does a good job at showing that inequalities and injustices are a global problem and that each region faces a unique set of issues, defined by their socio-political and cultural realities. However, no region in the world is without serious troubles.
From the global fact sheet:

• Women all over the world are less willing to report sexual violence than robbery, Progress found. Across 57 countries, on average 10 percent of women said they had been sexually assaulted, but only 11 percent reported it. This compares to similar incidence of robbery, on average 8 percent, but a reporting rate of 38 percent.

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