Women stand with their daughters in Halajay Gawra, an 'FGM-free' village in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq - © UNICEF/UN09330/Mackenzie
NEW YORK, 5 February 2016 – At least 200 million girls and women alive today have undergone female genital mutilation in 30 countries, according to a new statistical report published ahead of the United Nations’ International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation.
Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: A Global Concern notes that half of the girls and women who have been cut live in three countries - Egypt, Ethiopia and Indonesia - and refers to smaller studies and anecdotal accounts that provide evidence FGM is a global human rights issue affecting girls and women in every region of the world.
Female genital mutilation refers to a number of procedures. Regardless of which form is practiced, FGM is a violation of children’s rights.
By Seth Gershenson* - January 13, 2016
An important innovation of 2001’s No Child Left Behind Act, which was retained in the recently passed Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), is that schools be held accountable for the academic performance of specific student subgroups (e.g., low income and racial minority students) in addition to the aggregate performance of the entire student body. Indeed, a clear goal of the ESSA is to fully prepare all students for college and career success. Visible differences by race and income in intermediate educational outcomes (e.g., attendance and suspensions) and in access to the inputs that facilitate educational success (e.g., effective teachers) provide a starting point for conceptualizing policy responses to race- and income-based achievement gaps.
I argue policymakers should also begin to focus on gender gaps. Gender gaps in educational outcomes are equally important, yet fundamentally more difficult to conceptualize, for several reasons. First, students of both sexes reside in the same households and neighborhoods, attend the same schools, and sit next to each other in the same classrooms. This implies that gender gaps in educational outcomes are not driven by the same types of inequality of opportunity and access as other socio-demographic gaps.
By Jessica Davis Pluess, Aditi Mohapatra, Katherine Fritz, Cecile Oger, Kelly Gallo, Racheal Meiers
A growing number of companies understand that advancing women is essential to business innovation, productivity, risk management, and market growth. This report draws on insights gathered from interviews with 10 multinational companies actively engaged in advancing women’s economic empowerment, as well as a comprehensive review of the latest literature and leading company practices and programs.
In the report, we aim to help companies build effective strategies for women’s economic empowerment by applying a holistic and integrated approach: “holistic” in considering the broader conditions necessary for women’s advancement and “integrated” in leveraging the full set of business assets a company can deploy. We focus on opportunities across four sectors—information and communications technology, healthcare, financial services, and consumer products. Many of the lessons are relevant across a range of industries and companies.
By Kelly Wallace, CNN – December 11, 2015
(CNN)It's hard to comprehend how the United States, one of the wealthiest nations in the world, is now one of only eight countries -- including Afghanistan and South Sudan -- where the number of women dying as a result of pregnancy and childbirth is going up.
An increasing mortality rate for American mothers in 2015? How could that be?
First, the numbers: More than 25 years ago, in 1987, there were 7.2 deaths of mothers per 100,000 live births in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2011, that number more than doubled, jumping to 17.8 deaths per 100,000 births.
What's going on? A range of experts made clear to me that there isn't any one factor to explain the increase, but a number of issues, including obesity-related complications such as hypertension and diabetes, the dramatic increase in the number of cesarean section births, a lack of access to affordable, quality health care and more women giving birth at older ages.
