NATION AND WORLD
University Daily Kansan, April 4, 1985
Page 16
Study says women unequal
By United Press International
NEW YORK — Women have made some progress in economics, education and politics in the last 40 years but still have not achieved equality with men anywhere in the world, a worldwide survey said yesterday.
"Women around the world have one thing in common — inequality with men," said Ruth Leger Sivard, author of a report on the survey documenting women's gains and losses over the last four decades.
The survey was made by World Priorities, a research organization, and was financed by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation.
The report said women around the world had not made significant
progress since the end of World War II, even though they had gained ground in the work force, in election education and in political rights.
"There are 2½亿 women in the world, speaking 2,976 languages and living in countries where the average annual income ranges from under $200 to $30,000 per capita." Sivard said.
"DESPITE THIS DIVERSITY, women are finding common ground. Their shared sense of inequality has triggered a movement for change which is emerging everywhere; it differs from earlier drives for equity and inclusion on broad issues," she said.
Main points in the report:
attained equality with men."
Main points in the report:
*Whether in the economy, education, health or government, there is no major field of activity and no country in which women have
- "The changes achieved in women's status during the period since World War II have been extremely uneven and on the whole, modest."
- "The influx of women into the paid labor force has not significantly narrowed the gap between men's and women's pay; nor has it stemmed the rising tide of poverty among women. Despite the key role that women have in Third World economies, they have been largely by-passed in development strategies."
- "Throughout the world women are still disproportionately represented among the poor, the illiterate, the unemployed and the underemployed. They remain a very small minority at the centers of political power."
By United Press International
Rights under attack, guild says
WASHINGTON — The Reagan administration has launched a systematic attack on civil rights laws that goes far beyond disagreement over particular remedies for discrimination, the National Lawyers Guild said yesterday.
The 7,000-member guild — the first integrated legal group in the nation — said that under the Reagan administration the Department of Justice "has become the advocate for the traditional defendants in civil rights actions, leaving minorities and women without legal representation at the federal level."
In testimony prepared for delivery to the House Subcommittee on
Civil and Constitutional Rights,
Jules Lobel and Barbara
Wolovitz said the administration had proceeded to erect obstacle upon obstructance in the enforcement of America's basic rights and had established divisions and base enforcement on the narrowest possible grounds.
"UNDERLYING ALL THESE changes in civil rights enforcement is the Reagan administration's denial of the institutional and systemic character of racism and sexism in America, which is now being called social and economic reality." Lobel said in a news conference.
"The administration's denial of that reality threatens to turn back the race in Congress, abandonment of the Civil Rights Acts enacted in the 1860s and
1870s." he said.
The Guild was particularly critical of the Justice Department's decision to ask more than 50 cities, counties and states to modify their affirmative action plans to end the use of numerical goals and timetables designed to increase public employment
"WITHOUT WAITING For a definitive court ruling, the Justice Department is therefore seeking to vacate or modify decrees, which prior administrations negotiated with city, county and state defendants," the Guild said. "The Justice Department has reversed its position from that of plaintiff to one of supporting the defendants, leaving the real plaintiffs in interest (women and minorities) without representation in many of these situations."