Global Patterns in the Achievement of Women's Human Rights to Equality

The large attendance and extensive press coverage of the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women serves as an illustration of the growing interest in the topic of women’s human rights around the globe. Increased popular interest in women’s human rights issues has been paralleled by the proliferation of scholarly books and journal articles on the topic. ¹ Much of this literature addresses the topic of women’s rights from the perspective of the international lawyer and deals with international laws and organizations that seek to forward the cause of women’s rights. There is also some work conducted by social scientists who use traditional, nonquantitative research methods, but unfortunately there are only a few systematic empirical studies that have addressed questions related to women’s human rights. The topic of women’s human rights remains a topic in need of much more systematic empirical research.

The lack of much quantitative, social scientific research is somewhat puzzling because recent years have seen much work aimed toward achieving the goal of a theoretically driven and empirically supported understanding of why other classes of human rights are realized. One vein of research has focused on explaining cross-national variations in the class of human rights relating to personal integrity, guaranteed in the UN Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 ² and including the rights not to be imprisoned, tortured, or killed, either arbitrarily or for one’s political views. ³ Several cross-national studies have focused on a class of rights pertaining to the provision of basic human needs, which have been addressed in international human rights treaties. ⁴ Still other research has focused on whether countries’ foreign policies, in the form of foreign aid ⁵ and refugee policies, ⁶ are influenced by human rights concerns.

We began this study seeking to explain cross-national variations in the realization of women’s human rights and searched for works relevant to our efforts. Though there is little research that directly addresses this topic, we were able to find some studies where the human rights terminology is not used but that did, nevertheless, cover issues clearly linked to women’s human rights. There are, for example, empirical studies on narrower issues in the larger problem of women’s equality, such as participation by women in the labor force, that are probably related to a society’s propensity to respect a broader set of women’s rights. ⁷ Other research focuses on the percentage of decision making positions that women hold. ⁸ Finally, there are some studies that address issues broader than women’s human rights (at least in most conceptions of that term), such as the quality of life of women and systems of male dominance. ⁹ Unfortunately, except for a very recent study by Clair Apodaca ¹⁰ focusing on the economic and social achievement of women, those who have explicitly sought to explain variations in the realization of women’s human rights have elected to perform case studies. For the most part, they have explained the abuse or realization of women’s rights largely in terms of specific cultural or national constructions. ¹¹

Why is there so little research that addresses systematically the question of how and why women’s human rights are violated? Perhaps a large part of the answer to this question is that, as yet, researchers have put forth little effort to identify indicators to measure this concept. Addressing the measurement issue is a necessary step before empirical, quantitative research of the type we wish to conduct can begin. Therefore, in this study we begin our work toward an empirical understanding of the determinants of women’s human rights by defining and then measuring two theoretical dimensions of women’s human rights, one economic and the other political. Having developed these two measures, their utility will be shown by conducting some analyses that will describe women’s human rights conditions around the world. Our data is provided in an Appendix in the hope that they will be of use...