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Plan of action and Review of Beijing Declaration for the past 25 years.

The UN declaration for women support is considered as the largest reformation of the women’s movement in Asia. Did it achieve the action plans that it set out to do? Is it still relevant in today’s era? Is it time to reassess where we stand on bringing women to center stage?

Let us look at this in detail, shall we?

To deconstruct, the twelve areas of concerns focused by the UN Beijing declaration were:

• Women and Poverty
• Education and training of Women
• Women and health
• Violence against Women
• Women and armed conflict
• Women and the economy
• Women in power and decision-making
• Institutional mechanisms for the advancement of women
• Human rights of Women
• Women and the media
• Women and the environment
• The girl child

All of these areas specifically target improving various aspects of women’s lives and providing them with equal opportunity to explore their future. However, a review conducted by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), in cooperation with the UN Women Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific has shown that the progress rate has been very slow.

“Education is a human right and an essential tool for achieving the goals of equality, development and peace.” – Platform for Action Critical Area of Concern, Beijing Declaration

The focus of this action step is to provide equal access to education, vocational training, science and technology and continuing education, the institutionalization of non-discriminatory education and training, and the promotion of life-long education and training. This has pushed governments of these countries toward making policy changes and created large scale impact for girls in education.

In the review report, except Kiribati and Tonga, all of the Beijing+20 respondent countries reported the existence of national policies that mandate equal access of women and men, girls and boys to education. Female enrollment rate at primary and secondary school level has been over 90% in these countries. Overall, the past twenty-five years has seen an enormous increase in the female literacy rates. Even though the results seem hopeful, there are challenges that are still difficult to overcome.

Lack of Women in STEM

Enrollment is the first step which is successful in almost all of the countries, however, to retain female students in education is a major challenge in many of the countries. Lack of basic infrastructure, transportation to school and even lack of female teachers were few challenges raised by many of these countries.

Apart from all these challenges, even if girl children are retained in education with their mere will and grit, biggest issue that stops them from entering STEM is the socio-cultural norms and practices that result in subject-streaming. Technology, Science and Engineering are considered as streams that are ‘masculine’ in nature. In countries such as Kyrgyzstan, Samoa, Georgia, Vietnam, it was reported that females were concentrated in such fields as the humanities, arts, education, health and journalism. Subject-streaming is influenced by the societal practice of getting daughters married earlier, giving preferences to education of sons, girls carrying out household chores along with education. Girl children always carry the burden of a household even after having access and freedom to get education.

However, one can hope that these review audits and reporting at a global level can create changes at an institutional level in retaining female children in the field of STEM. Providing them with proper infrastructure, including more female teachers, and encouraging them to be at par with male children are few areas to be focused on by governments, and we can be assured the this can bring out a mass of women engineers and scientists in the near future.

Let us now see how Asian women navigated through gender mainstreaming to find their own voice in the occidental concept of women empowerment.

In the early 20^th century, as we discussed earlier, women empowerment and inclusion of women in education sector largely took place to improve the economic conditions of the nations. Orchestrated by their male-proponents, these movements were focused largely to increase volume of the working sector with cheap labor and create a pretentious outlook to the western world.  This diluted itself in the mid 20^th century when the economic conditions were back to being favorable for major countries and the previously discarded ideas about gender role made a comeback. Femininity was emphasized as a characteristic of women, and the thinking that ‘women belong at home’ returned. This led to the gradual decline of women in the workforce, providing the ultimate power to men.

Meanwhile, this period also witnessed a large number ‘home-grown’ or specific campaigns carried out by women at national level. This was because Asian women were finding it difficult to relate to the large-scale movements that took place in the west and went through a sort of ‘identity crisis’ in clearly defining their reason for these social movements. For large parts of the twentieth century, Asian women activists disliked the word ‘feminism’ because it was associated with ‘Western feminism’ that was defined as aggressively individualistic, anti-male, anti-children, and therefore anti-family. ‘Western feminism’ was branded as alien becuase it was inapplicable to the Asian context.  Asian feminism and empowerment were influenced by political deprivation and democratic fluctuations. Activists self-consciously strove to distinguish themselves from their western counter-parts while reaching out for a global platform for their movements.

Translational networking to move across countries for employment:

To mobilize their movements, women began networking and reaching out their national borders facilitating higher employment rate across borders. One such example where employment and these movements went hand in hand, in the face of limited support at home, was the Thai movement for women’s ordination in the Theravada Buddhist monkhood, where link up with female ordained monks overseas helped them achieve their end mission.

Empowerment through employment was achieved through powerful allies that were created internationally. Women across the globe supported each other to debate women’s questions and global patriarchy. Many national level movements collectively led to increase of Asian women in the arena. These indigenized movements had their own grand narrative of feminism and women empowerment. All of these movements were reformed with more women being educated and crafting their skills in fields that were dominated by men. By the end of 20^th century, these small movements combined to form a bigger bubble and brought in a social awareness which ultimately pushed the United Nations Economic and Social Commission to form ‘The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action’ in 1995. A visionary agenda for women to analyze the situation of women around the world and to assess the efforts of States in support of women’s empowerment. Followed by the mobilization of over 40,000 government delegates, experts and civil society representatives at the Fourth World Conference on Women, the Beijing Declaration and Platform of Action embodies the commitment of the international community to achieve gender equality and to provide better opportunities for women and girls. The Plan of Action is reviewed every five years by the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) and recommendations on global and regional level are received for betterment of women.

Let us go back in time to understand the root cause, shall we?

To foreign and local capitalists in the past, women were the cheapest source of labor for agriculture and industry. To the colonial authorities & missionaries, local women had to be educated to be good (preferable Christian) wives & mothers to professional white-collar men who were running the colonial economy.

To the male reformers, women needed to be adequately westernized & educated to enhance the ‘modern’ and ‘civilized’ image of their country and themselves, increasing the demand for ‘civilized housewives’ to be a good influence on the next generation.

A concept of non-European cultures seen through the prism of European cultural, aka Orientalism.

Attempts to emulate Western economic development were associated with an appreciation of Western cultural values, especially of concepts such as natural rights, liberalism and parliamentary democracy.

It is in this context of resistance to various forms of foreign domination on one hand and monarchies & exploitative patriarchal and religious structures on the others, that the democratic movement for women’s rights emerged in East.

Importance of cheap female labor:

Under the capitalist development under colonial or semi-colonial context, women were to become available as potentially the largest and cheapest reserve army of labor. Traditions and practices which restricted women’s mobility or enforced their seclusion were detrimental to capitalism. With the growth of industries – especially those associated with textile & plantation sectors, the demand for women’s labor grew in all the countries under this context –

China for silk,

Japan for textiles and consumer goods,

Iran for carpets,

Egypt for cotton,

India for textiles,

Turkey for rugs & textiles not to mention tea, rubber, coconut, sugar plantations etc. in most of these countries. Hence, movements toward further emancipation of women were expected.

The bureaucrats, missionaries and male reformers of the local bourgeoisie were convinced that women had to be emancipated from the social abuses of a ‘savage’ past, from practices that were defined as repugnant by the prevailing norms of European society. Obvious areas of violence and oppression were highlighted, such as widow burning, veiling, polygamy, concubinage and seclusion in Egypt, Turkey, Korea, India, Vietnam, Iran and Indonesia, and foot-binding in China. But to these were added other so-called ‘barbaric practices’ that went against the Christian ideas of monogamy and sexual control that Europeans enforced upon their own women.

The nature of the resistance movements in these countries and of the feminist struggles within those movements varied with the balance of forces that resulted from capitalist expansion. The women’s struggles in this context, did not move beyond the sphere of limited and selected reforms: equality for women within the legal process, the removal of obviously discriminatory practices, the right to the vote, education and property, and the right of women to enter the professions and politics, etc.

Women’s movements do not occur in a vacuum but correspond to, and to some extents are determined by, the wider social movements of which they form part. The general consciousness of society about itself, its future, its structure and the role of men and women, entails limitations for the women’s movement; its goals and its methods of struggle are generally determined by those limits. Mention will be made in the country studies of courageous women who consciously strove to move beyond those limits in the pursuit of goals that today would be defined as feminist, but who failed because of the lower levels of general awareness.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the ~man who points out how the strong ~man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the ~man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends ~himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if ~he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that ~his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

An unrealistic web of conflicting & unobtainable expectations of who we are supposed to be – this is our living reality.

When I started this journey in STEM, I was probably six or seven years old. I never quite understood how pressing one squishy button on the remote changed channels on the tv and how the different channels came through two metal rods sitting on top of the tv. Boisterous in nature, taking things apart to understand why it worked was one of the things I did in between homework & naptime.

Growing up in the East, education was of utmost importance in our household. After 12th grade, it was time to decide what stream of engineering I wanted to get into, engineering was a given. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I have always had the habit of dancing to the beat of my own drum. I wanted to do exactly what everyone told me not to. With the grades that I got, and the need to do something different, I thought I could go for Mechanical Engineering. All hell broke loose. Not a single soul around me, friends, or family, encouraged that decision. You see, back home in South India, in most universities, for every 160 male students that had enrolled in that stream, there was 1 female enrollment. Sexual harassment and mental abuse were widely accepted as a part of becoming an engineer. You are a girl; you want to be an engineer? Expect everyone to misbehave with you and expect abuse, that way you will not be surprised, and you can be prepared and on alert. Do not complain or blame others if you are not treated fairly, this is a choice you are making. I want to mention that I am not 80 years old. This was in 2005.

Obviously out of legitimate concern for their wild girl child, my parents refused to enroll me in Mechanical Engineering. The common stream to choose at the time, was IT or Computer Science. That way, you get to sit safely at a desk and not be on a construction site. I cringed at this limitation. I hated everything about it. What had changed? All I did was grow up! Why was it ok for me to learn the mechanics of how stuff works when I was seven but not when I was sixteen?

I pushed back and told my parents if I cannot get into mechanical engineering, then I will take up Instrumentation Engineering. One of my dad’s friends, was a controls & instrumentation engineer. I loved the way his brain worked, I remember listening to stories that he shared with my dad and was fascinated by it. The enrollment ratio in this stream was not great either but it was not 160:1. My parents felt safe enough to let me join the Electronics & Instrumentation Engineering Department. We found a middle ground.

It has been fifteen years since. I speak to the next generation of engineers and find that even though the current generation is more aware of how to treat each other and how to be more conscious about conducting oneself, the ratio has gotten worse. There is approximately one female student for every three hundred male students. My heart truly aches.

Diversity, inclusion, belonging, equity & equality topics are now being discussed at large, I cannot get through 30 seconds of scrolling on LinkedIn without seeing these words. But when human-beings do things without understanding the “WHY” behind it, they are bound to repeatedly fail. There have been four waves of women empowerment movement in the west and three in the east. There is so much data floating around the internet it is quite overwhelming.

My attempt at starting this Being in the Arena series, is to educate myself and those interested, in learning the root cause of what this movement is about, and why it has taken so darn long for this remarkably simple and clear message to get across efficiently, focusing on the East– leading into why representation matters and how my journey can become a future/current 15-year-old wannabe mechanical engineering girl’s survival guide.