Only 30 percent of the girls in the world attend secondary school. In developing countries, one in seven girls is married off before age 15, and worldwide girls as young as 11 are forced to work as prostitutes. These harrowing numbers are what drove director Richard Robbins and a team of former ABC News journalists [...]
On November 29, 1952, a handful of women set out to create a different kind of world. These women—from eight family planning organizations representing the Netherlands, Hong Kong, India, Singapore, West Germany, Sweden, United Kingdom and the United States—believed that empowering women to control their own bodies was essential to creating healthy families and sustainable [...]
Last year, a quiet but powerful book, Sex and World Peace, was published by an interdisciplinary group of researchers and scholars. The authors, Valerie M. Hudson, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli and Chad F. Emmett, set out to demonstrate and document the complex but evident relationship between how girls and women are treated and the security [...]
The World Economic Forum released its Global Gender Gap Report [PDF] this week, drawing attention once again to the dire state of gender-based inequalities worldwide. Conducted by Ricardo Hausmann of Harvard University, Laura D. Tyson of the University of California at Berkeley and Saadia Zahidi of the World Economic Forum, the report assesses 135 countries [...]
It was recently revealed that in a Saudi Arabian version of the IKEA catalog, all of the women were erased. Here are the similar pages from the U.S. and Saudi Arabian catalogs side-by-side: After an outcry over this revelation began, IKEA responded by called the removal of women a “mistake” “in conflict with the IKEA [...]
Alemnesh was seven years old, living in Amhara, Ethiopia, when her family secured for her a marriage to a much older man. She was expected to drop out of school and take on the burden of household responsibilities. In this new life, Alemnesh would never learn to read or write. She would likely be sexually [...]
Within the next 10 years, the number of people over age 60 will surpass one billion, as the world’s population reaches between seven and eight billion. By 2050, the world’s 80-and-older population will nearly triple. The United States currently has the third highest number of older people (ages 60 and up), but many developing countries [...]
One year ago, President Obama addressed the United Nations General Assembly after the U.S. signed a declaration ensuring women’s political and economic empowerment. The president has already made serious headway toward the goals of this declaration by issuing an executive order in August that promised to better respond to violence against women globally by creating [...]
