Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women, Research Paper Example

One of the Millennium Development Goals created by the UN is to Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women. The target, target 4, under this title is to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and in all levels of education no later than 2015.  In order to show the ways in which Haiti has worked on these elements of gender equality we will examine the ratio of girls to boys in primary, secondary and tertiary education (indicator 9), literacy rates in the 15-24 age group (indicator 10), women who participate in non-agricultural wage employment (indicator 11), and the proportion of seats held by women in national parliament (indicator 12).  Figure 1 taken from the 2013 MDG Report illustrates some of the policies in Haiti and explains the status of implementation. Many of the policies have yet to be implemented and therefore gender equality is far from reached.

The gender disparity in Haiti’s schools is still a major issue in the country. The World Bank has no data available concerning enrollment rates (Figure 1). Due to the lack of data it is hard to say what has changed in the country. However, there are some sources, which provide a glimpse into the situation in Haiti. For example, according to the official MDG indicator site the “Gender Parity Index in Primary level education” was at .98 in 1998, illustrating that both boys and girls attended primary education at the same rate. There is no data after 1998, so it is impossible to say what the current ratio is. According to a report by the World Bank in March of 2015, concerning the effects of a tuition waiver, the cost of school annually is $130 and more than two hundred-thousand children do not attend school (World Bank). Moreover, the majority of Haitian schools are privately run and the majority of schools require a tuition fee, making the access to school very low for poor families (World Bank). According to the 2013 MDG Report Haiti New Look gender parity was achieved in 2000 for secondary and tertiary education, this is a great step forward for Haiti. Figure 2 speaks to the efforts of the MDGs to increase the number of years that girls have of schooling. The stark comparison between women in their forties and teenage girls highlights that progress has been made, even if the overall number is still extremely low.

Literacy rate is another indicator that the MDGs use to illustrate growing gender equality in a nation. UNICEF reports that between 2008-2012 70.5 percent of women aged 15-24 years old were literate in comparison to the 74.4 percent of males. This shows that there is growing equality between the two main genders in terms of literacy. The CIA World Fact book states that in 2015 literacy for women over fifteen years of age was at 57.3%. This radical change between 2012 and 2015 could be due to the various factors, one being the lack of centralized data, which allows for different results. Continuing with the CIA data men of the same age group had a literacy rate of 64.3%, which creates a 7% gender gap.

According to the 2013 MDG Report women play a vital role in Haiti’s economy. Like most other countries women disproportionality work in the home, or domestic sphere, in addition to their work in the traditional work force (2013 Report). While women only make up 48% of the formal workforce they spend fifteen hours a week on domestic work in comparison to men’s seven hours a week, this leads to them being unable to hold more hours in the traditional economy. Women aged 15-49 work more commonly in the home compared to agriculture (Figure 3). However, ” In 2012, 86.3% of employed women in the

Non-agricultural sector are working on their own account or are employed by a family member, and are not considered to be employed in the direction of the ILO”, meaning that their jobs are not regulated or protected by labor laws leaving women extremely vulnerable (2013 Report). In addition to this issue, women are more likely to be affected by unemployment and women only hold 30% of the jobs in the private formal sector (2013 Report). When women do have formal jobs they are frequently paid less then men for the same work (2013 Report).

Haiti has made little advancement in relation to women’s positions in government. According to the UNDP women hold only twenty percent of the country’s government positions, which is a step in the right direction but far from equal. In relation to indicator twelve: proportion of seats held by women in national parliament ( IPU) Haiti is severely lacking at only 4.3%. This illustrates that women are still not prevalent in the government limiting the opportunities that women have in changing the national status of women. Additionally, there is not a single woman in the Senate; making Haiti one of the six countries in the world were there are no women in one house of Parliament (2013 MDG Report Haiti). The lack of female representation highlights how much work Haiti still has to accomplish to achieve any sense of gender equality.

The lack of information available about the status of women in Haiti makes it very difficult to provide an accurate analysis of where the women are today. As we saw there have been small improvements in education, and little to no improvements in work force equity or government representation. This illustrates that gender equality, nor gender equity, was reached in the MDGs time period and that women are still deeply disadvantaged in the country.  Moreover, according to USAID the problem of gender-based violence, which is connected deeply connected to poverty, was exasperated after the earthquake of 2010, due the multitude of vulnerable populations (USAID 2015).  While there are organziations such as Poto  Mitan and KOFAVIV that work with women’s rights and female survivors of sexual violence respectively, there is little change occurring on the national governmental level in conjunction with the MDGs. One reason behind the lack of equality could be the country’s, like most countries of the world, adherence to traditional gender norms that value domesticated and submissive women, without updated data or information it is hard to know for sure why Haiti fails to promote gender equality.