Hello, Ida Lupino, wherever you are. Maybe this is all you need to know about how women are still viewed in society, even when they reach the highest levels of achievement in business, politics, the media, or Hollywood. The morning after Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win the Best Director Oscar at the Academy Awards – for an Iraq war bomb disposal tale – it was International Women’s Day and just as much attention was focused on what the actresses and starlets were wearing on the red carpet in Los Angeles as her distinction, made all the sweeter, of course, because she won the award over her former husband, James Cameron for a computer-generated movie about aliens somewhere, but don’t say that in Europe because FRONTEX, the border guards, will head for Malta and look for African immigrants trying to sneak into the European Union on rickety, leaking, overloaded boats.
And it came just a few days a survey by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) found that only 10 women are heads of state among the world’s 151 elected national leaders – and five of them in the EU, led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and has also earned the number one spot of the Forbes World’s 100 Most Powerful Women list, which is heavy with the names of women who are Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of major companies around the world, but light on politicians, although the EU also boasts Irish President Mary McAleese (#69 on Forbes;) Finnish President Tarja Halonen, (68;) Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite and Swiss President Doris Leuthard, although to that mix you can also now add Bosnia-Herzegovina President Borjana Kristo, Iceland’s Prime Minister Johanna Siguroardottir (75;) Croatian Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor, and even Antonella Mularoni, Secretary of State for San Marino, but not the recently-ousted Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko, who held the number 47 spot. Curiously, the former European Commissioner for Competition, Neelie Kroes, came in at 53, ahead of elected heads of state.  So while the EU can crow it has a handful of women in powerful positions, that’s just it – only a handful and not in any of the major countries. The other countries headed by a woman, although in the case of India in the number two spot, are Chile, whose President Michelle Bachelet stepped down on March 11; Argentina, India, Liberia, and the Phillippines.

Not there yet
Women fared a little better in parliaments around the world. The United Nations had called for 30% of seats for women in legislatures. The IPU said women parliamentarians now average 18.8%, compared to 11.3% in 1995, when an international conference on women in Beijing called for gender balance in executive and legislative bodies. There are now parliaments in 38 countries in which 30% of seats are occupied by women. Only seven countries reached that goal in 1995. “Things have certainly improved, but not nearly as much as we would have wanted them to,” said Anders Johnson, IPU Secretary General. Johnson presented a Map of Women in Politics in 2010 to the international conference on women at UN headquarters in New York. This is quite a time for women, at least when it comes to talking about them instead of giving them more power and authority. The European Commission on March 5 launched a new “women’s charter” in a bid to fight gender inequality at home and at work in both Europe and around the world. European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has made women’s rights a key plank of his organization’s policy, pushing member states to appoint women to the body. Currently, nine out of the EU’s 27 commissioners are women, but he had to pushed into making sure there were that many. The charter, launched at the beginning of the Commission’s five-year mandate, represents “a commitment to promoting gender equality in and beyond Europe,” Barroso said as he presented it to journalists in Brussels alongside Commission Vice-President Viviane Reding. “Here you have a man and a woman presenting together, as President and Vice-President, a new women’s charter ... It is only if we have men on board that equality between men and women can be put into practice,” Reding, who controls Commission policy on equality and human rights, said. The main principles of the charter are to promote women’s economic independence, bring their pay closer to the level of men’s, boost their representation at the top official levels, crack down on all kinds of gender-related violence, and push other countries outside Europe to do the same, Barroso said. The Commission will take those principles into account in all its legislative proposals over the next five years, Reding said.

UN checks in
The United Nations is in the midst of a two-week conference to continue work on strengthening women’s rights globally, which was to be attended by more than 2,000 representatives of women’s groups from 50 countries. The 54th session on the Commission on the Status of Women at UN headquarters in New York was called also to mark the 15th anniversary of the historic adoption in Beijing of a Platform for Action to provide women the equality and opportunities given to men. The commission was to review progress made in the implementation of the platform. This year’s commission meeting is under the theme, Equal Rights, Equal Opportunities: Progress for All, pretty, if facetious words.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said in a prepared message for International Women’s Day, celebrated each year on March 8, that the landmark Beijing Declaration has had a “deep and wide-ranging impact.” He added that, “It has guided policy making and inspired new national laws. It has sent a clear message to women and girls around the world that equality and opportunity are their inalienable rights.” He further said, “The Beijing Declaration remains as relevant today as when it was adopted. On this International Women’s Day, let us look critically at the achievements of the past 15 years so we can build on what has worked, and correct what has not.” The UN said progress was made particularly on education for women and girls, but it was uneven between regions of the world and within countries. “The global averages (on education) also hide differences among women based on economic status, ethnicity, age, disability and other factors,” the UN said. It said major challenges remain on achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment. The UN said governments should pay more attention to advancing programs on reducing maternal mortality rates, violence against women and girls, women’s access to decent work, and women’s equal participation in senior decision-making positions.