A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power

by Jimmy Carter

  In the meantime other action is being taken. In 2013 Human Rights Watch released a ninety-five-page report on South Sudan that documents the near total lack of protection for girls and women who try to resist marriage or leave abusive marriages and the obstacles they face in achieving any relief from their plight. The U.S. Congress has passed a law that requires the inclusion of child marriage in its annual Human Rights Report and mandates that the secretary of state develop a strategy to prevent child marriage, including diplomatic and program initiatives. Both the United Nations and the World Bank have announced commitments to publicize the problem and to induce nations to end the practice.

  There are many encouraging developments; one is a special effort to assess the links between child marriage and slavery and to sharpen national and local laws so they are more specific and punitive when girls are forced to act against their will. Despite the persistence of the practice in many communities, these efforts have had some tangible benefits. In ninety-two countries surveyed in 2005, 48 percent of women forty-five to forty-nine years old were married as children, but the proportion is only 35 percent for women who are now twenty to twenty-four. The trend is good news, but the number is still far too high!

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  I.  The Elders are Martti Ahtisaari, president of Finland, Nobel Peace laureate; Kofi Annan, secretary-general of the United Nations, Nobel Peace laureate; Ela Bhatt, founder of the Self-Employed Women’s Association of India; Lakhdar Brahimi, foreign minister of Algeria and United Nations envoy; Gro Harlem Brundtland, prime minister of Norway and director-general of the World Health Organization; Fernando Henrique Cardoso, president of Brazil; Jimmy Carter, president of the United States, Nobel Peace laureate; Hina Jilani, Pakistani lawyer and UN special representative on human rights defenders; Graça Machel, education minister of Mozambique and widow of Nelson Mandela; Mary Robinson, president of Ireland and United Nations high commissioner for human rights; and Ernesto Zedillo, president of Mexico.

  17 | POLITICS, PAY, AND MATERNAL HEALTH

  On a global basis, women are habitually denied full and equal participation in political affairs, despite provision for it in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The United States has struggled with the issue. The Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted black men the right to vote in 1870, ninety-four years after the declaration “All men are created equal.” It was fifty years later that American women won the same constitutional status (though, with few exceptions, only white women could enjoy this right in practice), and slow progress was realized after that time. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first president to select a woman to occupy a cabinet post, and other presidents and I have chosen women for major roles in our cabinets and White House staff. I was able to appoint women to key cabinet posts, and a growing number of women are now serving as governors, in the House and Senate, and as chief executive officers of major corporations. In nations as diverse as India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Israel, Great Britain, the Philippines, Liberia, and Nicaragua women have served as presidents and prime ministers. These nations represent citizens who are predominantly Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian and include two of the three largest democracies on earth.

  As University Distinguished Professor at Emory University, I lecture in all the divisions: arts and sciences, law, theology, medicine, nursing, public health, and business. I usually speak for about thirty minutes and then answer questions from the students (and sometimes the professors). One of the subjects that I cover frequently is human rights, often involving gender discrimination, and a “trick” question I ask is “When did women gain the right to vote in the United States?” Hands shoot up and someone always offers the standard reply: “With the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920.” I point out that this amendment applied only to white women, and that it was with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 under President Lyndon Johnson that all black women gained this privilege. This makes the point that racial, religious, and gender discrimination are often interrelated.

  Globally, women first won the right to vote early in the twentieth century, beginning with New Zealand, Australia, and the Scandinavian countries. The Arab nations were the last to grant this privilege, and Saudi Arabian women are still not permitted to vote. (There is a promise that this opportunity will come in 2015, but similar commitments in 2009 and 2011 were rescinded.) Only recently have women begun to make real progress in holding major office in the political world. At this time there are fourteen female heads of state, the best known being Angela Merkel of Germany, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, Cristina Kirchner of Argentina, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, Park Geun-hye of South Korea, and Joyce Banda of Malawi. There are about 46,500 parliamentarians in the world, and women occupy 21 percent of the seats. Rwanda ranks first, with 64 percent; Cuba has 49 percent; the five Scandinavian countries average 42 percent; the parliaments in the Western Hemisphere have 25 percent, Europe 23 percent, Sub-Saharan Africa 25 percent (but Nigeria only 7 percent), Asia 19 percent, and the combined Arab states 16 percent. This is inadequate progress.

  When I was elected president in 1976 there were only eighteen women in the U.S. Congress (about 3 percent), but the number has increased steadily to 102 elected in 2012. This amounts to only 18 percent of the total, far below the world average and leaving our nation ranked 78th in women’s participation in government. In state and local government in America, seventy-three women now hold elected statewide positions, or 23 percent of the total, after a steady decrease from 28 percent, the high point, in 1993. In Los Angeles, a community of almost 10 million people, there is only one woman in the entire government, a position in the city council. She recently commented, “When I was in elementary school, there were five women on the city council.”

  As with racial discrimination, it is very difficult to change historical societal patterns even when there is a desire to do so. I experienced this problem as president in overcoming the exclusion of women from service in the federal district courts and the more senior appellate courts. When there is a vacancy, White House staff members usually consult with the U.S. senators from the state involved, then give the president a list of potential appointees; then the president’s nomination for judge is submitted to the Senate for confirmation. Prior to my election, only eight women had been appointed to the federal bench, and I was determined to correct this inequity. By the end of my term, I had a chance to fill about 45 percent of the seats in the federal courts.

  At that time the primary obstacle in nominating qualified women was the relatively few female graduates of law schools, and not many of those had acquired enough seniority to become leaders in law firms or deans in university law schools. Another persistent problem was that many senators had close friendships and political obligations to men who occupied those positions. There was even an argument between my White House staff members and the attorney general I appointed, who claimed that there were very few qualified women and minority candidates. There was also some blatant prejudice against women serving as judges, and a few senators were able, through “senatorial courtesy,” to block my choices.

  Despite these obstacles, I was successful in having the Senate confirm five times as many women as all my predecessors combined, and in addition was able greatly to increase the number of judges from minority groups. I was fortunate also to have 88 percent of my judicial nominees approved by the Senate. There has been an encouraging increase in the number of women judges chosen by my successors, and the total in the United States is now at about 25 percent, compared to a worldwide average of 27 percent. It is obvious that, even under the best of circumstances, women have not been able to reach their potential of equal participation in executive, legislative, or judicial affairs.

  One of my most interesting and ultimately gratifying experiences with female candidates began in 1994 with the visit to our home of an Indonesian official who was seeking a site to build small airplanes he had designed that could be modified
very quickly from hauling cargo to carrying passengers. B. J. Habibie was a superbly trained aeronautical engineer from Indonesia who had earned his advanced degrees in Germany and became famous as a designer of innovative machines. He was serving as minister of research and engineering in the government of Indonesia’s president Suharto.

  I extolled the advantages of Georgia as the best location for a factory, and we had a long and enjoyable conversation about his interesting career and his new life in the world of government. I described some of the work of The Carter Center, including our having initiated the process of monitoring elections under often difficult circumstances. He and I communicated with each other a few times afterward, and he eventually informed me that plans for the manufacturing plant had been abandoned. Later I read with some surprise that President Suharto had been placed under house arrest, accused of corruption; he had chosen the nonpolitical engineer to be his vice president. When Suharto was forced to resign, Habibie became president of the largest Islamic nation in the world, which had been governed by dictators for forty-one years.

  A few weeks later I had a call from President Habibie asking if The Carter Center would consider leading a team to observe their first democratic election, and I agreed to do so. We had a crash course in the history and culture of Indonesia and soon learned that there were almost fifty political parties with candidates seeking five hundred seats in the Parliament and that two hundred more members would be added from the military, women, youth, and other groups. After being assembled as a body, the seven hundred parliamentarians would then choose a president, presumably from the party that had prevailed in the election.

  Rosalynn and I went first to Bali, a beautiful vacation site and home of the leading woman candidate, Dyah Permata Megawati Setiawati Sukarnoputri, who was known as Megawati and was the daughter of Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno. It was the custom to demonstrate support for a candidate by flying a small party banner from the top of a tall bamboo pole, and we noticed the overwhelming prevalence of Megawati’s following, especially in the small villages and rural areas. Indonesia comprises about nineteen thousand islands spread over a broad area of the western Pacific Ocean, and our one hundred observers covered as many of the key voting areas as possible.

  Although there were heated debates among the many candidates, the people were thrilled to have the chance to choose their own political leaders and were especially careful to comply with the law and election rules. Ninety percent of registered voters cast their ballots, there was an honest counting procedure, and Megawati’s party prevailed with 36 percent of the vote. This was followed by Suharto and Habibie’s ruling party, with 23 percent. Three others received about 10 percent each, and the rest of the votes were scattered among minor parties.

  Most of our observers returned home after the votes were counted, but we left a small group to observe the convening of the Parliament and choosing of a president. Habibie withdrew from contention, and it was widely assumed that Megawati would be elected, but there was intense opposition from some of the more militant Islamists to a woman having the highest office, and the Parliament voted instead for Abdurrahman Wahid, known as Gus Dur, a religious leader who had been aligned earlier with Megawati in reformist efforts. Since Wahid’s party had received only 10 percent of the popular vote and elective legislative seats, this decision was hotly condemned, and the Parliament compromised by electing Megawati as vice president. Over the months Wahid proved to be an inept administrator and was forced to resign in 2001. Megawati became the first female president of Indonesia and the fourth chief executive of a Muslim nation, after Pakistan, Turkey, and Bangladesh elected women leaders. Megawati and other party leaders invited The Carter Center back to observe the next election, in 2004, after the constitution was changed to permit direct election of the president, and the incumbent was defeated in a runoff.

  It is interesting to note that an overwhelming majority of citizens in the world’s three largest democracies have different religions: India (81 percent Hindu), the United States (76 percent Christian), and Indonesia (87 percent Muslim). Two of them have elected women as leaders of their government.

  One of the most widespread and punitive examples of sexual discrimination is in compensation for work. As women have achieved higher education levels, slow but steady progress has been realized since I was president thirty years ago, when the disparity in pay between American men and women was 39 percent. Although women compose almost half the U.S. workforce and now earn more college and graduate degrees than men, government statistics show that full-time female workers still earn about 23 percent less than men. Over the past decade there has been little improvement: the U.S. Census Bureau reports that women’s full-time annual earnings were 76 percent of men’s in 2001 and 76.5 percent in 2012.

  There is also a wide variation in pay equality among nations. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which includes thirty-one countries that are committed to democracy and an economic system of free enterprise, reports that the pay disparity against women varies from 4 percent in New Zealand to 37 percent in South Korea, with a global average of 18 percent. Even in the most advanced countries women are paid less than men for the same work.

  The difference at the executive level is even greater. Recent statistics show that among Fortune 500 companies only twenty-one CEOs are women, and at this top executive level women received, on average, 42 percent less compensation than men. Interestingly, Catalyst, a nonprofit organization, found a 26 percent better return on investment among American corporations whose board membership was more than one-fifth female than among those with no women serving. Perhaps the presence of women injects a wider range of perspectives, enriching the decision-making process; or it may be that those corporations with a more flexible and innovative approach—factors in success—were the ones inclined to involve women at the top level of governance.

  There is every indication that it is beneficial for a business to have women directly involved in its management, but this change is slow in coming. In its annual analysis of 235 large European companies, McKinsey & Company has found that, despite concerted efforts in some countries to increase the number of women at senior levels, progress has been very slow, with only a 6 percent increase during the past ten years. They concluded in 2012 that even “if improvement continues at the present rate, ten years from now women will have less than 20 percent of the seats on boards or executive committees.” Among the companies they surveyed only 2 percent of the chief executive officers were women, only 9 percent were on executive committees, while 37 percent were among total employees at all levels.

  When my fellow Elder, Gro Brundtland, was prime minister of Norway (1990–96), she led her Labor Party to adopt a rule requiring at least 40 percent of each sex represented on political committees and elected groups. She told me that at times there was a problem finding enough qualified men to reach the 40 percent mark. Later, in 2003, a law was passed in Norway that required all publicly traded companies to appoint women to at least 40 percent of their board membership or the company would be removed from the Oslo Stock Exchange. After ten years there are mixed opinions about its impact. A relatively small group of women now occupy many different board positions and have come to be known as “golden skirts.” One of them is quoted in the New York Times as saying that “it hasn’t had a ripple effect” in bringing more female success in positions of importance in business. The prevailing sentiment, however, is that the law has been helpful in boosting women toward equal standing in the overall society, and the director of the Institute for Social Research in Norway states that having more female directors has had “a slightly positive effect” on economic performance.

  When I was a student at Plains High School, there were only two male classroom teachers, plus one who concentrated exclusively on educating boys like me as future farmers. I remember how different it was when I became a freshman in 1941 at Georgia Southwestern College, where most of our p
rofessors were men. A 2011 report from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) states that even in 1974–75, thirty years after I was a college student, only 22 percent of the full-time professors were women; the rate increased during the next thirty-six years, but only to an average of 42 percent.

  Even in the field of higher education, where female enrollment is quite high, the economic disparity for women still prevails. According to the AAUP report, the number of women exceeded 57 percent of both undergraduate and graduate students in American universities. However, they held just 28 percent of full professorships. Among current presidents of colleges and universities, 23 percent are women, the number having doubled during the past twenty-five years, but the overall pay gap was about the same as in general employment, with women’s pay in full-time faculty positions about 80 percent of men’s.

  A 2013 study at Yale University showed that established professionals in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (the STEM subjects) are much more willing to give a job to a young male scientist than a woman with the same qualifications. If they did hire the woman, her average annual salary was nearly $4,000 lower than the man’s. It was striking to note that interviewed female scientists were at least as biased against hiring and paying women as their male counterparts.

  On the other hand, it is encouraging that over the past forty years the proportion of women PhD recipients has increased in engineering from 0.2 to 22.5 percent, in the geosciences from 3 to 36.6 percent, and in the physical sciences from 3.7 to 27.9 percent. However, women still hold far fewer full professorships than do men. Although women held 62 percent of the PhDs in psychology in a recent year, they held only 19 percent of tenured positions.