Another International Womens Day, another seventy-seven cents on the dollar

by Susan Galleymore

Its still true: for every American man earning $1, a middle class, married American woman earns $0.77 cents and many minority women earn less than that.(1) But such a quantitative view rarely indicates the day-to-day lived experience behind the numbers. And wage disparity between American men and women are meaningless in developing countries. Even in countries that have minimum wage regulations such as South Africa these are easily ignored: the desperate are forced to accept whatever theyre offered rather than stand on principle and go hungry. After my recent travels to South Africa, Iraq, Israel, and Palestine I can report that, on International Womens Day, 2007, overall opportunities for women in these countries have shriveled. In Johannesburg, Baghdad and West Bank villages even a quick look around shows womens lives are more hazardous than ever -- and wage rates are only a small factor in the decline.

South Africa has one of the largest income inequalities in the world. The average income of the richest 20% of South African households, largely white, is 45 times more than the average income of the poorest 20% of households, largely black and African. The majority of this nation's poor are rural African women whose incomes -- between R400 and R700 per month ($1 = R7) -- derive mainly from pensions and remittances from relatives. But the bleak picture for South African women doesnt end there. This country holds the dubious honor of rape capital of the world. In 1999, one in three of the 4,000 women questioned by the non-governmental organization CIET Africa, said they had been raped in the past year. In a related survey conducted among 1,500 schoolchildren in the Soweto Township, a quarter of all the boys interviewed said that 'jackrolling vernacular for recreational gang rape - was fun. Rape in South Africa frequently culminates in death by stabbing, by bludgeoning, by strangling, or by a combination of these and disemboweling is a common coup de gr�e. Babies as young as nine months are jackrolled, too, often by groups of adult men attempting to cure their HIV/AIDS via the mythic sex with a virgin prescription. In 2003, the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in South African adults was 21.5%. Over 5.3 of 44 million South Africans carry the virus; life expectancy for women is 41.2 years.

Up close and personal: Eleanor is a middle-aged, working class, Xhosa woman with two grown children. The end of Apartheid in 1994 made her life easier: the demise of Apartheids in-flux laws, for example, allowed her to work legally in Kwa-Zulu Natal where shed spent her adult life hiding her ethnic origins so as to earn a living as a live-in domestic worker. Apartheid, however, had worked its poison on her children whose economic opportunities were stunted by a system that instilled a view of themselves as good only for menial labor. Eleanors son, Lucky, found crime paid better than the below minimum wage he earned as a gas station attendant or working for tips as a parking lot attendant. His luck ran out, however, when a young woman hed raped spotted him in the street and called the police. Lucky is currently awaiting trail in a local jail notorious for inmate-on-inmate rape and an excruciatingly high rate of HIV/AIDS transmission. Eleanor intuitively understands Luckys future but feels she cant do anything about it: Apartheid may be gone but womens view of the state as omnipotent lives on.

Iraq: Since the United State and its coerced coalition of the willing invaded Iraq in March 2003 only the most intrepid statisticians collect data in that unfortunate country and that data presents a ghastly view. Johns Hopkins researchers estimate that more than a half-million Iraqis have died as a result of the U.S.-led invasion and its bloody aftermath. Researchers for the online edition of a leading British medical journal, The Lancet, estimated that 654,000 more Iraqis died of various causes after the invasion than would have died in a comparable period before; about 600,000 of those deaths are attributed to acts of violence with gunshots emerging as the leading cause of death (56 percent of the total); air strikes, car bombs and other explosions each accounted for 13 percent to 14 percent. Almost 60 percent of the deaths were among males 15 to 44. "To put these numbers in context, deaths are occurring in Iraq now at a rate more than three times that from before the invasion of March 2003. In this conflict, like all other recent conflicts, it's the population that bears the consequences," said Dr. Gilbert Burnham, lead author and co-director of the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Up close and personal: Anwar Jewards husband, son, and two daughters were shot to death when a U.S. patrol opened fire on the family car. Today Anwar lives in her brothers home with her surviving daughter, Abir, and Hassan, the son with whom she was pregnant when the shooting occurred. With marriage one of the few options for some sort of independence and respect for women with Anwars traditional background, as an over-35-year-old single mother and a widow, her chance at a second marriage is about zeroeven if enough marriageable men existed in Iraq. Since between half a million and 1.5 million people died in the eight year war between Iraq and Iran and, with the death toll in current war, Iraqi men are fast becoming an endangered species. So Anwar will live in her brothers home and Abir and Hassan will not even benefit from the social programs that Saddam Hussein offered during his tenure as the U.S.-defined and supported Butcher of Baghdad. Those programs free education, a decent and cost-effective national medical plan, and enlightened laws and programs to up-lift Iraqi women and their children -- disappeared with Saddam and the ascendancy of the U.S.s privatization schemes. Prior to the sanctions imposed upon Iraq during the 1990s, womens salaries were amongst the highest in the Arab world.

Israel and West Bank/Occupied Territories are so closely intertwined in the politics of pain that it is difficult to present one without the other. Women in these regions face major differences in access to resources that go far beyond wage disparity. Israeli/Palestinian unemployment rates -- respectively 8.6% to 20.3% in 2006 -- indicate that about 79% of Palestinians are employed. These percentages include Palestinians engaged in agricultural work but dont indicate that many Palestinians farmers and agricultural workers are not working. Instead, they are cut off from their workplaces orchards and fields by the 30-foot tall concrete wall or wire fence that cuts farmers off from their agricultural lands. Israelis view the wall as a vital security barrier that prevents suicide bombers from entering their towns. More to the point, though, is that just about every action that alleviates an Israeli womans daily chores driving a car or catching a bus or taxi, taking a child to a medical facility, assuming relative safety for a child returning home after school aggravates a Palestinian womans chores. Some roads in the West Bank, for example, are prohibited to Palestinian cars, buses, and taxis so these travelers are forced miles out of their way to cover short distances.

Up close and personal: Israeli Dorothy and Palestinian Amina present two sides of the same contradictory coin. Dorothy, born in the U.S., went Aliyah (2)to Israel in her teens when the state of Israel was actively encouraging Americans to settle in that land. (Jews from all over the world are still encouraged to immigrate and settle -- despite the hardship this brings to indigenous people.) Dorothy married a first generation Israeli and brought up her children there. She lives a privileged middle-class live in a safe, north Tel Aviv suburb and is active in anti-militarism groups although her grandchildren will almost certainly serve in the Israeli military -- likely in the Occupied Territories where indigenous Palestinian Amina has her home. Ironically, while Amina has ancient roots in Palestine she is barred from accessing much of her ancestral land and its resources available to Dorothy and her family. Aminas three-year-old daughter, Lena, suffers from kidney disease and requires regular dialysis. Dorothy drives on roads closed to Palestinians when she escorts Amina to hospital when Lenas kidneys failed. But, when Dorothy cannot smooth Amina and Lenas way over closed roads, or through Israeli check points, or hospital security systems, Amina and Lena are on their own. Then Amina must carry the child in her arms through the check points where Israeli soldiers arbitrarily refuse to allow her to carry the medical equipment the child requires -- or even the right to travel to a hospital at all. After such refusals, Amina has, alone, in the dark, and in the rain, carried Lena over rock-strewn mountains for emergency medical care in Palestinian hospitals. Without Dorothy, getting the child to an Israeli hospital under these conditions would be impossible. Amina said, Please understand that most Palestinian women do not have an Israeli ally such as Dorothy to rely on for help. Most Palestinians families struggle against far greater obstacles than I do.

It is a tough to say whether, in 2007, women are struggling more than women did in 1908 when 15,000 women marched through New York City demanding shorter work days, better pay and voting rights. But, it is significant that the comparison can even be made almost one hundred years later -- and that women and their families are still at risk. Today, the risk is still man-made exploitation and war are still primary culprits but, as our climates change and our planets health declines, wage disparities may come to be seen as small potatoes. It is time, now, to stand up for womens rights and for the planets health.