The Balance of Power

I have a great co-worker who shares interesting things she reads. That is one thing I love about working - the chance to spend time with people who are at least somewhat interested in the things I'm interested in. This morning, she sent me this article to read: The Balance of Power - By David Rothkopf | Foreign Policy
Basically, the point of the article is this: we make a big deal when women are in positions of power - but does this represent real progress for women? Women make up 20% of governing bodies but are 50% of the population! As the author writes: "Because these figures are so familiar to us, so broadly accepted, we end up celebrating the occasional story of progress or individual success as representing far greater gains than are actually being realized." And because I can't say it any better than the author did, this point is made:

...the underrepresentation of women in positions of power is proof not so much that men still dominate the top of the pyramid as it is of a system of the most egregious, widespread, pernicious, destructive pattern of human rights abuses in the history of civilization. There is no genocide against any people that has produced more victims than the number of females who have lost their lives to discrimination against the birth of girl babies (in Pakistan alone, for instance, there is a culturally encouraged "shortage" of an estimated 6 million females), or who have died from the unwillingness of societies to provide the health care women need, or who die as a result of social customs that allow fathers to kill daughters for "shaming" families, husbands to kill wives for adultery, and men to perpetrate other horrific violence against women. That countless millions of women are also regularly raped, beaten, and abused by men only compounds these atrocities.
The systematic, persistent acceptance of women's second-class status is history's greatest shame. And for all our self-congratulations about how far we have come, we live in a world where even in the most advanced countries, deep injustices against women remain. These injustices, of course, have other costs beyond the purely human ones. Nothing would help societies grow more than educating and empowering women economically. Democracy is a sham until the planet's majority population actually achieves equitable representation in deliberative bodies and executive positions of government. And the absence of women in positions of power is also, of course, a guarantee that women's interests will continue to be minimized, ignored, or repressed.

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