PRESIDENT MARY McAleese has described as “particularly brutal” and “utterly appalling” the consequences for women of the global economic downturn.
Delivering the commencement address at Mount Holyoke, one of the leading liberal arts colleges for women in the US, Mrs McAleese said a return to poverty threatened many of the advances women have made. “Women are already paid less, work more often in the informal economy with fewer rights, own businesses dependent on microfinance loans – many of which will dry up – and rely on now dwindling remittances to keep home budgets going. And it is girls that often get pulled out of school first when family finances are reduced,” she said.
“Two-thirds of the illiterate people in the world are women. That equates directly to disempowerment. It is the first, founding inequality on which wider restrictions on female achievement and contribution are based,” she said.
The President noted that, despite the enormous possibilities that have opened up for women in the developed world, political life remains overwhelmingly a male preserve. Women were also underrepresented at the senior levels of business. “Twice as many men as women belong to political parties. In my own country, only 13 per cent of the people in our parliament are women,” she said.
“A tiny fraction of senior management in the private sector worldwide are women. Even when education is fought for and achieved, the ability to use it freely is often anything but easy – one-third of African women with a third-level education emigrate, markedly higher than for men. And, of course, down to the very level of physical safety, in fewer than one in 10 cases of sexual violence worldwide is the perpetrator charged,” Mrs McAleese said.
She was speaking at the start of a six-day visit to Massachusetts focused on economic issues and the Irish-American community.