Girls are hot. Reproductive
rights are not. This is the strange
and yet unspoken contradiction endemic in the current development
discourse about gender equality. From the boardrooms of
Exxon Mobil, to the World Bank, to the offices of the Nike
Foundation and the overflowing halls at Davos and the Clinton
Global Initiative, you can hear people talking about the importance
of investing in girls. Women are often added as an afterthought—their
inclusion is often phrased as “girls and women” rather than as
“women and girls.” Most often you hear that “educating girls” is the
magic bullet of the 21st century.
The last time I heard something being prescribed as often as
the solution to everything from low GDP rates and malnutrition in
infants to endemic poverty, it was the early 1990s and the buzz was
about something started by a Bangladeshi man named Muhammad
Yunus. Girls’ education is the new
microfinance. Yet educating girls
about their sexuality and providing funding for access to contraception,
safe and legal abortion, and broad
education about their reproductive
health and rights—which was a significant emphasis of
global philanthropy in the 1980s and 1990s—has now dwindled in
popularity. Although a few dedicated foundations and the European
bilateral aid donors continue their commitment to organizations
such as the United Nations Population Fund, the new global actors
are focused on girls’ access to schools and learning.
Proponents of girls’ education (of whom I am one) are right
about many things. Girls who are educated are, in the long run,
likely to marry later, bear fewer children, educate their own children,
and be less vulnerable to sexual abuse and coerced sex (and
therefore less likely to be infected by sexually transmitted diseases).
These outcomes have important positive implications for
the poorest developing countries that are still struggling to expand
their economies and provide basic services to their citizens. Larry
Summers, former president of Harvard University, who was widely
criticized for his 2008 comment about women’s lack of natural
aptitude for science and math, was once considered the guru of
girls’ education. During his tenure as chief economist at the World
Bank, he argued that investing in girls was among the most effective
development choices that poor countries could make in their
march toward economic and political development. Yet while
these outcomes are encouraging, we need to remember that girls
deserve the right to be educated, even in
the absence of such results, simply because
they are human beings and because women’s
rights are human rights.
Second, it is important to remember that although education
brings with it many benefits for girls and the women they grow to
be, it is not a magic bullet. It is not the solution to the pressing and
interlinked problems of climate change and population growth.
High levels of education for girls and women at high-income levels
can coexist with stubborn structural gender inequality, as is the
case in Saudi Arabia and Japan.
Third, as the disturbing Stieg Larsson novels remind us, it is
far from clear that educating women is the answer to decreasing
violence against them. Societies with highly educated women and
girls still continue to struggle with endemic and ongoing violence
against women. A November 2011 report from the US Department
of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
for example, estimates that one in four
women in the United States has been
sexually abused, and one in five has experienced
physical violence and abuse.
So what is going on? Why is the discourse in the United States
so determinedly focused on the issue of educating girls, and what
are we refusing to talk about?
Women’s Sexuality Is Messy
The answer is the messy stuff: women’s sexuality. It is striking that
the most influential media messages about the importance of investing
in girls tend to depict them as “little girls.” They are 12 and pigtailed
in Nike Foundation’s short and catchy
animated film. There is
nothing threatening or unsettling about a cute little girl. We don’t
see a young woman in all her sexual complexity—her power, her
attractiveness, her vulnerability, her mystery, her desire to attract
and influence others, her need to be loved, recognized, valued. As a
colleague from the Nike Foundation once said to me, “It is much
easier to sell girls’ education programs to male CEOs than the politically
charged agenda of women’s reproductive rights!”
Campaigns about girls’ education rarely focus on girls in the
United States or other parts of the developed world. Implicit in the
message is that this is about “those girls”—the ones who are brown
and black and poor and live in different countries and aren’t like
us. There is little, if any, talk about the similar challenges that face
our own girls—the ones who live at or below the poverty line in
Oakland, Calif., the South Bronx, and rural Mississippi.
So we want to educate girls, but we don’t want to talk about
sex. We want girls to read, but we don’t want to provide them with
information about their bodies. We want to save girls from female
genital mutilation and rescue them from brothels, but we don’t
want to know why they choose to sleep with their boyfriends or
trade sex for commodities or affection or grades. We want girls to
get married later, but we don’t want to talk openly about contraception
or abortion. Even the Obama administration, the best friend
American women’s reproductive rights advocates have had in a
decade, refused to abide by the US Food and Drug Administration
ruling to allow over-the-counter access to birth control pills that
would allow early prevention of possible pregnancy. Last November,
it was only thanks to the feverish efforts of women’s rights advocates
that Mississippi did not pass a law outlawing the use of IUDs.
This is the inconvenient truth that is hiding behind the current
excitement about educating girls. We are happy to educate them
and hope that reading, writing, and ’rithmetic will somehow magically
translate into positive outcomes. Yet everything I learned from
funding women’s rights organizations for 14 years at the Global
Fund for Women suggests that women and girls cannot rely on formal
school education alone to prepare them for a world that continues
to treat them as “less than.” Girls and young women need basic
information about their bodies and programs to build confidence
and self-esteem. The value of sex education in schools has been
studied and recommended for decades, and sex ed has been incorporated
into the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Yet
this remains one of two important documents—the other is the
UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination
Against Women—that the United States has refused to ratify
because of internal political resistance from conservative forces,
which believe the best way to deal with sexuality is to suppress it
and encourage abstinence.
In February, I was in meetings at the United Nations
Population Fund, or UNFPA. In the 1990s, UNFPA was a pioneering
organization in global reproductive
health and rights. Working
with civil society and governments, it helped create the groundbreaking
consensus of the 1994 International Conference on
Population and Development, where more than 150 governments
committed to making access to contraception and family planning
part of a comprehensive approach to gender equality. Yet, despite
this global consensus, the Bush administration cut funds for this
UN agency, pushing millions of women into positions where they
had little or no access to birth control. As Julia Whitty wrote in a
May 2010 Mother Jones article, “Although
it’s unclear how many babies were added
to the human family as a result of the
global gag rule, the UN estimates that at its
height in 2005, the unmet demand for contraceptives
and family planning drove up
fertility rates between 15 and 35 percent in
Latin America, the Caribbean, the Arab states, Asia, and Africa—a
whole generation of unplanned Bush babies.”
The real irony about the unwillingness to talk about sex and contraception
is that this conversational lacuna is happening against
the backdrop of climate change and natural resource depletion.
Last October, the seven billionth person was born on our globe.
You would think that everyone would be touting the results of studies
by the Futures Group and the National Academy of Sciences.
These show a strong correlation between addressing the unmet
need for voluntary contraceptive use and family planning and the
potential to reduce carbon emissions by 8 to 15 percent. Yet these
are topics that most environmental and women’s rights activists
are wary of broaching. The environmentalists shy away from talking
about family planning for fear of being labeled racists; the women’s
rights activists resist openly discussing contraception or abortions
for fear of losing support among US conservatives.
Yet if we want our daughters to grow up with confidence, courage,
and competence, we must
make sure that they grow up with
knowledge about and access to contraception. We should build
schools, fund libraries, encourage teacher training, and support free
tuition, but we also need to push for comprehensive access to sex
education for both girls and boys, not just abroad, but right here in
the United States. The words of Margaret Sanger are as prescient
now as they were when she first uttered them: “
No woman can call
herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can
call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will
or will not be a mother.” If the future of the world depends on the
freedom of women, it must include their sexual and reproductive
freedom. If not, their “freedom,” to paraphrase Janis Joplin, will be
just another word for “nothing left to lose.”
Article by
Kavita N. Ramdas
Executive Director
Ripples to Waves
