This has sparked a debate throughout the country, as religious leaders condemn this new development. Official rules limit beauty parlor licenses, which leaves companies vulnerable to raids by the Mutawa, or the religious police. Some beauty parlors display stickers warning women of damnation for plucking eyebrows or showing a made-up face to anyone other than their husband.

However, as more women enter universities and travel abroad, analysts suspect that the beauty industry will grow. Hair salons, for instance, boom as word-of-mouth, peer reviews and social network sites make it increasingly easy to find new products and trends. Women exchange beauty tips on Twitter and teenagers organize “make-up” nights, where girls can show off their new discoveries. It would seem, therefore, that femininity in Saudi is undergoing redefinition.

Full article here: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ba5a8c12-9350-11df-bb9a-00144feab49a.html

Despite the hopeful promises made by Karzai and foreign leaders, the future for Afghan women is still very unclear. While the Afghan government’s goal of reconciliation with the Taliban was barely touched upon in Karzai’s remarks, it is well known to be one of the government’s chief goals. Many Afghan women leaders worry that women will be overlooked in the peace processes with the Taliban, and that engagement of the Taliban will lead to a loss of the minimal progress that local women have made in gaining traction and influence. Afghan women are also worried that the U.S.’s goal of rearming local militias will jeopardize women’s rights.

In reference to Karzai’s goal of peace with the Taliban, The New York Times speculates that “the sparse commentary seemed to signal that there was still little agreement on exactly how to proceed after months of meetings and consultations within the Afghan government and with American, United Nations and NATO allies.” Hillary Clinton has tried to dissuade local women’s fears by reiterating that she views defending women’s rights as a “personal commitment,” and that no plan for Afghanistan’s future can “come at the cost of women’s lives.” But it remains to be seen if and how local women will be included in the next steps of the peace-brokering process. Without their direct involvement, Afghan women’s rights will surely be at risk.

To learn more about the Kabul Conference, see http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/21/world/asia/21afghan.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all.

Ms. Gameel’s story demonstrates the fact that in Egypt, the increase in the number of women in the workforce has not led to any change in the attitudes surrounding women’s traditional roles. In a recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in association with the International Herald Tribune, 61% of those surveyed in Egypt said that women should have the ability to work outside the home. Yet, 75% answered that when jobs become scarce, men have more of a right to work than women. This is reflected in recent unemployment figured for individuals between the ages of 15 and 29. Men in this age range face 12% unemployment, while the unemployment rate for young women is 32%.

Women are also extremely underrepresented in Egypt’s public sector. Only eight of the 454 Parliamentary seats are filled by women, and none of the country’s 29 governors are female. Egypt’s general assembly attempted to ban women from applying for judgeship within the State Council, as they decided that women were too emotional for the role. Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif had the decision overruled by the constitutional court, but no women judges have since been appointed to the council.

In addition, female illiteracy is very high in Egypt, with 47% of rural women and 23% of urban women incapable of reading or writing. This further limits the opportunities for women to pursue meaningful careers. The few desirable job opportunities available to women are almost always restricted to those from prosperous families.

This discouraging atmosphere has led more young women to want to stay out of the workplace. Ms. Gameel displays this regression in gender attitudes when she says, “I used to be ambitious and I had dreams. Now I just want to get married and stay at home.”

Iman Bibars, chairwomen of the Association for the Development and Enhancement of Women, reflects that “yes, more women are working, but not every work is liberating.” It is unclear what path young Egyptian women will choose if attitudes and opportunities in the workplace do not improve.

For more information, see the complete article at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/world/middleeast/14iht-letter.html?_r=1&ref=women

As many as half of the women prisoners in Afghanistan have been convicted of “moral crimes.” These crimes include such acts as refusing to marry, attempted adultery, and running away from home.

Mastura, age 19, was three months pregnant when her husband claimed her unborn child was not his and kicked her out of their home. She was picked up by the police, and she and her new infant son currently live in prison. She reflects that “every time I think about it, I cry, and I say to myself, ‘What crime have I committed that I should be in prison?’” About 40 other young children also live with their mothers in the prison. They are taken from their mothers at age five and sent to a boarding school, according to prison authorities.

One sixteen-year old girl named Sabera recalls that she was about to become engaged, and her fiancé-to-be came by himself to ask her for her hand before having his parents visit her. A neighbor spotted them together and called the police, resulting in Sabera being sentenced to three years in prison. Her sentence has since been shortened to 18 months as “an act of mercy.” She will spend this time sitting in prison instead of attending school.

Many women are imprisoned for attempting to run away from homes in which they are abused, and they may be detained for months before their stories are checked and they are released. There is no legal provision that defines “running away,” so police operate off of their own interpretation of Islamic Sharia law.

The one consolation for these women’s misfortunes is that they are no longer kept in the same prisons as male convicts. Instead, they reside in Badam Bagh, a brand-new facility built as a response to concern about the number of rape incidences occurring in the co-ed prisons.  However, improved living conditions do not justify the fact that many innocent women still lose years of their lives in jail. Zarafshana, the director of Badam Bagh, sums up the plight of her charges, saying, “if these women were treated with justice, I don’t think 50% of them would be in here. They are here because of problems in the family or personal vendettas.”

For more information, see the complete BBC article at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/8771605.stm

Human Rights Watch found that most Kurdish women are uninformed about the potential health risks of circumcision, and many receive unclear reasons as to why they are undergoing the procedure in the first place. FGM has been connected with hemorrhaging, infections, and complications during birth. Yet it still finds large support among some Middle Eastern communities. Many men support FGM because they believe that the hot climate of Iraq leads to increased sexual desire that can be quelled through genital mutilation.  Some religious supporters of the practice claim that circumcision is sunna, or based on the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad. Others view a circumcised women as more pure, and as such would prefer their wives to endure the procedure. Efua Dorkenoo, the FGM program advocacy director at Equality Now, responds to these claims by stating that “despite several cultural reasons to justify it, FGM is done primarily to suppress the sexuality of girls and women.”

Some members of the Kurdistan government have reacted negatively to the recent report. Mariwan Nawshbandi, a spokesperson for the region’s Ministry of Endowment and Religious Affairs, argues that the claims of FGM are “extremely exaggerated,” and that the government faces “issues far more important” than genital mutilation.

Kurdistan has made some progress in protecting women’s rights by passing harsh laws for men convicted of honor killings and opening three shelters for women suffering from abuse. However, the country still lags in its response to female circumcision. Other nations that have found high rates of FGM have had much more active responses, with 17 African countries banning the practice over the past 15 years. A law to formally criminalize female genital cutting was proposed in 2007 in Kurdistan, but it did not receive enough support to reach the Kurdistan National Assembly.

Many women are attempting to fight the practice by refusing to force their own daughters to undergo circumcision. But often a mother’s protest is not enough.

For more information, see Time Magazine at http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1998966,00.html

I knew my plan to spend my recent trip home eating my way around Monrovia was off to a good start when my sister showed up at the airport to greet me accompanied by a pot of bitterleaf over doughy fufu.

My mom and I, jet-lagged and woozy, peered into the trunk of Eunice’s car. I snatched the cover off the pot. The scent — a pungent mix of palm oil, smoked fish, juicy crawfish, roasted beef and the leafy spinach-like bitterleaf greens — hit my system as swiftly as a strong shot of espresso. Into the stew went a greedy finger; I was licking the sauce before Eunice could smack my hand away.

Liberian food is my weakness. Hearty, spicy and influenced by the immigrants and settlers who have over the years made this tiny coastal country home, it incorporates the best of West African cooking with traditions from the American South, where enslaved Africans brought their recipes, refined them and then took them back to Africa when Liberia was colonized by freed American blacks in the early 19th century.

The result is Creole cooking with a coastal African twist — “sweet” — as we say in Liberia, the way an Italian would use “squisito.” Big, hearty stews that incorporate all manner of meats, fish, chicken, pork and shellfish, served over either rice or fufu, a fermented cassava dumpling that drinks in the flavors of the stew.

In Liberia, it is the vegetable, not the meat, that is the star. Instead of, say, steak with two sides, it’s a given that a typical Liberian dish will have all manner of meats in it, with dried fish adding a kick. (That can be a sore point with some foreigners, especially Americans, who don’t like fish that tastes fishy. “Why would anyone use fish as a seasoning?” my American sister-in-law, Pieta, asked. )

But the vegetable is what differentiates each dish, and Liberian cooks are masters at extracting every drop of flavor from our tropical greens. Hence the reason no Liberian would ever say, “I’m having chicken with bitterleaf” for lunch. Of course you’re having chicken (and beef and pork). It’s the bitterleaf that’s special.

And special it is. We checked into our hotel — RLJ Kendeja — and within five minutes, my mother, Eunice and I were sitting around the coffee table in my mom’s suite, bowls propped on our laps. I closed my eyes as the first spoonful of fufu, dripping in bitterleaf, entered my mouth. Eunice had used at least four or five Scotch bonnet peppers, and I quickly started to sweat. But holy crow, was it good. For 20 minutes I ate, completely tuning out my sister and mother as I drowned myself in the familiar taste of home, my eyes watering, nose running, and mouth on fire. It was going to be a great week.

The next day, my mom, my Aunt Momsie and I went to lunch at Evelyn’s Restaurant Bar and Grill, on Broad Street in downtown Monrovia, our teeming capital city. Traffic there is awful, with potholes in the street, lights that don’t work and young boys running up to the cars selling everything from dish towels to hard-boiled eggs. Evelyn’s sits squat in the middle of it, packed with businessmen, relief worker types and social doyennes decked out in colorful lapas and sarongs.

Evelyn’s has a menu of sandwiches, salads and shawarma, but I went straight to the list of Liberian specials of the day. Not only did it include palm butter, it had palava sauce too.

Palm butter is our national dish. In this case, the vegetable star is palm nut, which we pound into a mash, and then cook the heck out of, extracting the beautiful buttery sauce, which holds together — you guessed it — crawfish, dried fish, chicken, beef, pig feet, even suck-suck, which is what we call a snail-like creature that we put in our stews. (Its name comes from the method of consuming it: you’ve got to suck the meat out of the shell, along with all those delicious palm butter juices.) Palava sauce is another stew, made from jute leaves, and it has an okra-like consistency.

My mom rescued me from having to decide between the two. “You can taste — just taste — some of my palava sauce,” she said. Aunt Momsie, who lives in Monrovia full time, shook her head and ordered a burger.

We stayed at Evelyn’s for almost three hours, chatting up the procession of diners who paraded through for what is the most important meal of the day in Liberia. My palm butter was heady, and I sucked the poor little critters out of every one of the suck-sucks on my plate. My mother’s palava sauce was fine — it was aided by the fried sweet plaintains that she ordered on the side — but I had made the right call. Collecting our cleaned plates, the waitress grinned at me as I rubbed my swollen stomach.

“It wa’ sweet, enh?” she said, in Liberian English.

I nodded. American English couldn’t do that palm butter justice. “It wa’ too sweet,” I said.

Since the civil war ended in 2003, all manner of restaurants, bars and nightclubs have been returning to Monrovia, which during the ’70s considered itself a West African cultural, dining and high life capital. Don’t get me wrong, parts of the city still look like the set for an African “Apocalypse Now.” But there’s a more exuberant air to the population now, as if Liberians finally believe that the two decades of civil war that had bedeviled them was over.

That exuberance is spilling into the food, and the restaurant scene is one of the fastest growing in the country. At P.A.’s Grille in the Lakpazee neighborhood, Liberians and expatriates come in for the exquisite goat pepper soup, served daily with fufu and accompanied by okra, beneseed (a sesame seed paste) and a fiery pepper sauce made by sautéeing Scotch bonnet peppers with onions and, yes, dried fish.

At Musu’s, a bar on Tubman Boulevard near the Congo Town neighborhood, a late-night mix of university students and aging lotharios nibble on the roasted beef with pepper that serves as the country’s answer to 4 a.m. American diner food and wash it down with Club Beer, from Monrovia Breweries.

And near the Airfield section in Sinkor, Rose Tolbert has converted a residence into a beautifully lighted watering hole called Ro-Zi’s N’yla Cafe, with indoor and alfresco seating. There, diners can sample Liberian fusion cuisine: a salad of smoked chicken and plantain, bong fries (seasoned cassava pieces fried like French fries) and a spice-laden dish called voodoo pasta.

But set the food at Ro-Zi’s aside for a minute. Ms. Tolbert has also invented a cocktail that she calls the Cane and Abel. It’s made out of Liberian cane juice — think moonshine without the refinement. Cane juice, distilled from sugar cane, is the kind of rotgut usually left to the guys at the package store with the plain brown paper bags. I’ve heard that some drivers actually have gotten their cars to run on it.

I was aghast. “But Rose,” I said, gesturing to the mostly expat crowd in her restaurant one night. I lost my American accent in my shock. “You giving d’ people’ children cane juice?”

Rose gave a smug smile. “I refined it,” she said, describing a daylong process during which she boiled down the cane juice, adding God-knew-what, until it became, in her words, a “liqueur,” which she then used as the base of her Cane and Abel cocktail.

Hmm. I took a dubious sip, grimacing as a searing hot flash lit its way down my throat and into my stomach. “Yeah, you refined it alright,” I muttered.

But a moment later, I was reaching for my glass again. The taste, a combination of ginger, orange and rubbing alcohol, was sweet, actually. In the Liberian sense of the word.

In 1965, my mother was the only female engineering student in her class in Germany. There were no ladies’ toilets except in the basement, where the cleaners had their lockers, and her professor urged her to find a husband quickly so she wouldn’t fail the exams.

Feminism in those days was pretty clear-cut: It was about women closing ranks to battle blatant sexism, get an education and go to work. It was, as my mother said recently, “about women pushing into the world of men.”

The feminism of the future is shaping up to be about pulling men into women’s universe — as involved dads, equal partners at home and ambassadors for gender equality from the cabinet office to the boardroom.

In the early 21st century, women in the developed world find themselves in a peculiar place. With boys failing in school and working-class men losing their jobs to the economic crisis, pundits predict not just The Death of Macho (Foreign Policy, September 2009) but The End of Men (The Atlantic, July/August 2010).

Reality is more nuanced. Women earn more doctorates, but less money. They are overtaking men in the work force, but still do most housework. They make the consumer decisions but run only 3 percent of Fortune 500 companies.

“In theory, we now have equal rights,” sighed one senior female executive at a French multinational, who tellingly requested anonymity for fear of riling the men at her company. “In practice, we still have babies.”

In the Western world, motherhood remains the barrier to gender equality. Until they have children, young women now earn nearly the same as men and climb the career ladder at a similar pace. With the babies often come career breaks, part-time work and a rushed two-shift existence that means sacrificing informal networks like the after hours beer-and-bonding experience often crucial at promotion time.

So far, the instinct of politicians, companies and women themselves has generally been to sharpen their focus on, well, women.

Many Western countries protect female jobs during maternity leave, and several offer mothers a right to cut back their hours. In the corporate world, (female) human resource officers lobby for flexible work time, and (female) diversity officers organize female mentoring programs. Female executive networks where the ladies can bond are booming. At countless women’s conferences, women debate with women about women and bond some more.

At best, those initiatives are good for tips and morale. At worst, they trap women in their role as primary carers. What they’re not doing is getting more women into leadership positions.

“We’ve got to wake up,” said Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, chief executive of 20-first, a gender management consultancy. “We’ve got to start focusing on the guys.”

The only thing that can level the playing field at work is a level playing field at home. And that requires a major shift in public policy and corporate culture.

In the few countries where fathers take paternity leave on a significant scale, that leave is highly paid and not transferable to the mother. Predictably, the Nordics have led the way. Iceland, which comes closest to reaching gender equality according to the World Economic Forum’s gender gap index, has gone furthest, reserving three months — a full third — of its leave for fathers. Nine in 10 Icelandic men take time off with their babies. A lawmaker, Drifa Hjartardottir, described the 2000 law as “one of the biggest and most important steps taken towards gender equality since women’s right to vote.”

It took a male prime minister to sell the legislation to the country, and it took male leaders in Sweden and Norway to pass similar laws. It was a man who championed Norway’s boardroom quota obliging companies to fill at least 40 percent of the seats with women.

Would a female Spanish prime minister have been able to appoint a cabinet that is 50 percent female in 2004?

Unlikely, thinks Celia de Anca, of IE Business School in Madrid. “When you want to change a culture,” she said, “it’s easier for a representative of that culture to sell the change.”

Basically, guys are the more effective feminists because other guys are more likely to listen to them.

That’s also true in business. Role models of female leaders matter, Ms. de Anca said. But male role models who take time off with their children, leave the office at a decent time, promote women and spread the word with male colleagues matter perhaps even more.

The message is filtering through.

In France, for example, the Institut d’Études Politiques is making gender studies part of the core curriculum for all students from 2011. Deloitte France is starting an initiative this month to educate men on staff about gender diversity. A handful of companies, including the nuclear giant Areva (run by a woman) have put men in charge of gender.

Jean-Michel Monnot, head of the European diversity program at the food service company Sodexo, says his gender is his greatest asset in convincing male colleagues of the business case for promoting women: “You need to speak the language of the guys.”

Few men are overtly sexist these days, he said. But they don’t think twice about scheduling late meetings. Some who give the promotion to the guy instead of the recent mother think of themselves as considerate.

Mr. Monnot, who until 2007 managed 60 production sites, speaks from experience. It took a man and fellow sports fan to bring home the issue to him when he explained at the bar counter one day why he liked a good gender mix in his teams. It improved the atmosphere, gave rise to new ideas and was more in line with Sodexo’s clients.

“Until then, I didn’t think there was a problem, and I certainly didn’t think of myself as the problem,” Mr. Monnot said. Now he travels his company’s sites encouraging managers to shut their offices at 7 p.m. and recent fathers to go part-time “to set an example.”

Giving the next generation strong father figures would not only help explode the glass ceiling, it might also be the best hope for those failing boys in school who lack male role models.

Men have a lot to gain from the rise of women, said Joanne Dreyfus, an audit associate at Deloitte in Paris, pointing out that at the moment three-quarters of those taking advantage of the company’s flex-time scheme are women.

Put another way: The last frontier of women’s liberation may well be men’s liberation.

Article courtesy of The New York Times

JOHANNESBURG, Jun 15 (IPS) – The face of politics is changing in
the southern African country of Malawi. And civil society is
making plans to ensure that it changes even more.

Fresh from a dramatic increase in the number of women
representatives elected into national government last year, the
NGO Gender Coordination Network is already implementing plans for
the Malawi’s “50/50 campaign” to ensure that more women than ever
before sit in local government seats after the November
elections.

Their enthusiasm is inspired by the dramatic increase in the
number of women representatives elected to national government
during the 2009 elections.

A record number of 237 female candidates stood during the May
2009 elections with 42 women making the journey into parliament.
By doing so, Malawi’s female representation increased from 14 to
22 percent.

Emma Kaliya, chair of the NGO Gender Coordination Network
implementing Malawi’s 50/50 campaign, was recently honoured with
a Southern African Trust “Drivers of Change” Award for her role
in the campaign.

Kaliya told IPS that various strategies were being used to
change perceptions about women’s capacity for political
leadership in the national “50/50 campaign – 2009 and
beyond”.

“The first thing we did was to conduct a needs assessment of
the aspiring women candidates. We reviewed both sitting MPs and
those candidates who were aspiring to stand. We collected about
400 names from political parties, our own structure and from
district assemblies,” Kaliya said.

After assessing the needs of the women, the organisation then
arranged capacity building for those candidates: “We began
profiling them through the mass media as well as through
community mobilisation meetings. We would take aspiring women
candidates to community meetings where we would discuss why the
community should support women candidates.”

The organisation assisted the women with campaign materials and
promotional items like T-shirts.  ”We also gave them some funds
for transportation purposes during the campaign. The money was
not much but it helped those who wanted to campaign,” Kaliya said.

The current minister for persons with disabilities and the
elderly, Reen Kachere, is one of the women who benefitted: “The
exercise was a great experience to learn from in order to inform
future elections where gender issues are concerned. I came out
from the experience more knowledgeable and with win-win
strategies for women.”

Malawi developed a national programme in 2008 responding to the
50/50 requirements before the SADC Gender and Development
Protocol was adopted.

The 50/50 campaign is already drawing on a list of candidates
to participate in the November 2010 local government elections.
“We are collecting names, consulting with all parties and going
to district assemblies to identify women candidates. The national
50/50 campaign is for all women, regardless of the party they are
coming from,” Kaliya said.

Because of these campaigns, women are beginning to understand
the need for them to participate in politics if they want to
change the laws that affect them, Kachere said.

MP Anita Kalinde added that women also needed assistance from
NGO’s to be able to get into politics: “Women need to be
assisted right from the primaries and also after, where they
compete with their male colleagues.”

Kaliya added that in the last election the media played a
crucial role in profiling the women candidates assisting them to
reach distant communities they could not travel to with their
messages.

“Radio profiling helped most. All 237 candidates who stood were
given space to talk about their manifestos on local
radio…Women are usually invisible during election campaigns or
there are usually only negative stories (about them) but this
time around we got real support. Every day we were reading or
hearing something about the 50/50 campaign,” Kaliya said.

But there are still challenges that women candidates have to
overcome.  ”If we did not have the SADC (Southern African
Development Community) protocol, it would be very difficult
because Malawi has an equality element in the constitution but it
does not have a quota or affirmative action in the framework. The
electoral systems – not having proportional representation – are
a big barrier because women are competing with men who have a lot
of resources,” Kaliya said. (The SADC Protocol on Gender and
Development commits countries to work towards the goal of having
50 percent women in political and decision-making positions by
2015.)

The commercialisation of the elections is also a challenge.
“Women have to compete with men. Unlike men, they do have a lot
of money. You need resources: you cannot campaign if you don’t
have a vehicle because most places are far apart,” explained
Kalinde.

But female politicians are also getting more support from all
voters, men and women. “People are gradually accepting the
gender dimension. The realisation of the need for women to
participate in the development of their nations through elected
positions is growing and impacting on cultural practices that
marginalised women,” said Kachere.

Kaliya explained that while more women than men voted during
elections, initially women would vote for male candidates – even
if there was a woman standing for election. But the 50/50
campaign has changed that.

“But now, more women are voting for women. You could even see
old, old, women coming to vote and they would say: ‘This time
around we have to vote for women. The government has said it -
even men – so why should we not vote for women?’”

(FIN/2010)

Couresty of http://www.ipsnews.net

Corporate boards across the Western world are still extremely imbalanced in their gender makeup. Currently, women in France only hold 9.5% of corporate board positions. In the United States, boards are comprised of 12.2% women, and in the UK, 8.5%.

French women have been far from silent about their anger over the current gender imbalance. In Paris this May, a feminist group called La Barbe (“The Beard”) charged the stage at the shareholder meeting of Veolia Environment. The women, all sporting fake beards, protested the fact that the company’s board of 17 only includes one woman. Similar protests have occurred at meetings of other major companies, such as that of the insurance company Axa.

Norway is the only other country to have established required gender quotes, and has since seen the proportion of women on its corporate boards skyrocket. In 2002, before the quota was enacted, only 6.8% of corporate leaders were female. Now, that number has increased to 34%.

Many French officials are in favor of the gender quota, although they caution that it will not fix problems overnight. French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde has publicly reflected on the proposal, saying, “I used to be against quotas; you stand on your own merits and you should be recognized as such. But things are moving too slowly. There will be a lot expected of women simply because there will be resentment on the part of those who will have to make space.”

If the French legislation passes, companies would have six years to meet the quota. Should they fail to do so, the company will potentially be barred from adding any new male director. However, some worry that companies will focus more on quantity than quality in order the quickly fill quotas, and that women will be added as token members. This worry stems from the recent string of appointments of wives of famous French men to positions of corporate leadership. The public was shocked in April when Bernadette Chirac, the wife of former French president Jacques Chirac, was nominated for a position on the board of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton. Ms. Chirac is 77-years old, and will be the second woman on the 17-member board.

“It would be a huge mistake if boards made quantitative changes to their composition without improving quality,” says Miriam Garnier of the European Professional Women’s Network. “There is the potential to make cosmetic changes by adding women with political considerations in mind. This would be a terrible distortion of the law.”

For more information about the proposed quotas, visit http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-06-09/bearded-women-challenge-french-boys-club-boards-in-paris.html

To learn more, visit the BBC News article at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/africa/10202429.stm