Global Economy, Global Workplace, and Global Gender Discrimination

I’ve done my share of blogging about gender discrimination. (There are too many posts to link to here, but you can click “Danger Zone: Discrimination” under “Categories” and read away.) Though women still lag when it comes to C-Suite opportunities and pay equity, they have made considerable advances in the American workplace.

Everything is global now. Consider the number of companies operating in countries around the world. Consider our global economic recession. Thus, I recently found two “global articles” troubling. One was in the New York Times about Afghan women, and the other was in Slate Magazine about girls in China.

Afghan women are subject to a new Taliban-like law which, among other things, makes it illegal to resist a husband’s sexual advances, to work outside the home without permission, and to fail to dress as a husband requires. Sixteen million girls are missing in China, because they failed a key test to avoid abortion: they weren’t boys. 

The Afghan law was signed by President Karzai, whom the U.S. supports. The U.S. is so buddy-buddy with China that one can hardly remember the derisive moniker “Red China.” It’s true we don’t control Afghanistan or China. But the vast majority of Americans would find their treatment of women troubling, regardless of one’s view of a woman’s proper role or abortion.

America has previously used the bully pulpit to effect changes in other countries when their ways or laws were out of step with decency. In an increasingly global world, the treatment of any group as second-class or worse adversely affects that same group everywhere. American women will increasingly work in other countries, some of which will openly discriminate against them. We do nothing?

And while I’m pontificating, whatever happened to the “women’s rights movement” and “feminism”?

1. 

   LKS says:

   April 23, 2009 at 1:19 pm

   Sadly, I believe the influence that the US once had has faded considerably. We can no longer “effect changes in other countries” like we have in the past.