Document 42: "Plank 15: International Affairs," from National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year, The Spirit of Houston: The First National Women's Conference (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978), pp. 63-66.
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PLANK 15
INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
WOMEN AND FOREIGN POLICY
The President and the executive agencies of the Government dealing with foreign affairs (Departments of State and Defense, USIA, AID, and others) should see to it that many more women, of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, participate in the formulation and execution of all aspects of United States foreign policy. Efforts should be intensified to appoint more women as Ambassadors and to all U.S. delegations to international conferences and missions to the United Nations. Women in citizen voluntary organizations concerned with international affairs should be consulted more in the formulation of policy and procedures.
The foreign affairs agencies should increase with all possible speed the number of women at all grade levels within the agencies, and a special assistant to the Secretary of State should be appointed to coordinate a program to increase women's participation in foreign policy and to assume responsibility for U.S. participation in the funding of the U.N. Decade for Women. All concerned agencies of the executive branch should strive to appoint women on an equal basis with men to represent the United States on all executive boards and governing bodies of international organizations and on the U.N. functional commissions. A permanent committee composed of Government officials and private members, the majority of them women, should be appointed to advise the State Department on the selection of women candidates for positions on U.S. delegations, on governing bodies of international agencies, and in the U.N. system.
U.N. COMMISSION ON THE STATUS OF WOMEN
The U.S. Government should work actively for the retention and adequate funding of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, and it should recommend that the commission meet annually rather than biennially.
WOMEN IN DEVELOPMENT
The U.S. Agency for International Development and similar assistance agencies should give high priority to the implementation of existing U.S. legislation and policies designed to promote the integration of women into the development plans for their respective countries. They should also continue to study the impact on women in the developing world of U.S. Government aid and commercial development programs over which government has any regulatory powers. These agencies should actively promote the involvement of these women in determining their own needs and priorities in programs intended for their benefit.
HUMAN RIGHTS TREATIES AND INTERNATIONAL CONVENTIONS ON WOMEN
In pressing for respect for human rights, the President and the Congress should note the special situation of women victims of oppression, political imprisonment, and torture. They should also intensify efforts for ratification and compliance with international human rights treaties and conventions to which the United States is signatory, specifically including those on women's rights.
PEACE AND DISARMAMENT
The President and the Congress should intensify efforts to:
Build, in cooperation with other nations, an international framework within which serious disarmament negotiations can occur.
Reduce military spending and foreign military sales; convert excessive weapons manufacturing capacity to production for meeting human needs.
Support peace education in schools and advanced study in the fields of conflict resolution and peace keeping.
To this end the United States should take the lead in urging all nuclear powers to start phasing out their nuclear arsenals rather than escalating weapons developing and deployment and should develop initiatives to advance the cause of world peace.
INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION AND COMMUNICATION
Government agencies, media, schools, and citizen organizations should be encouraged to promote programs of international education and communication emphasizing women's present and potential contribution—particularly in developing countries—to economic and social well-being. Improved methods should be devised for collection and dissemination of this needed information in order to make adequate data available to policy makers and the public.
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DECADE
The U.S. should give vigorous support to the goals of the U.N. Decade for Women, Equality, Development, and Peace in the General Assembly and in other international meetings; should give financial support to Decade activities: and should participate fully in the 1980 mid-Decade World Conference to review progress toward targets set in the World Plan of Action adopted unanimously by the World Conference of International Women's Year, 1975.
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Background:
"Women's voices are seldom heard in government on the global issues."
Women and Foreign Policy "Mr. Carter spent his second full day on the job in the company of the men who will be involved in the shaping of his foreign policy and defense postures." The New York Times of January 23, 1977 did not, of course, italicize men when it printed that sentence. The exclusion of women from almost every aspect of foreign policy is simply taken for granted.
This unfair exclusion is against the stated policies of the U.S. Government and the U.N. World Plan of Action unanimously adopted by the International Women's Year Conference in Mexico City.
Foreign Service Agencies. Women are grossly under-represented at mid- and upper-level positions in the three major foreign affairs agencies, the State Department, the United States Information Agency, and the Agency for International Development (AID). For instance, in the State Department as a whole (including both civil service posts at home and Foreign Service posts abroad), only 4.3 percent of senior level and 15.1 percent of mid-level positions are held by women.
There is evidence that the State Department is just beginning to utilize the talents of its women. The Office of Equal Opportunity found that women lagged three to five years behind male colleagues in getting promotions and that women were clustered in support services rather than in policymaking. Discouraged by this lag, women were leaving the Foreign Service at middle levels, taking their valuable talents with them.
Delegations. Although the percentage of women on U.S. international delegations has doubled since 1975, the base year for the 1976 IWY Commission recommendation for an increase, it was still only 10 percent in September 1977. Since few women are in the technical and policy-making posts from which international delegations are chosen, efforts to appoint them have been sporadic and unsystematic.
Early in 1978 the Secretary of State directed that women and minorities should always be on the lists from which recommendations for delegations are made. One source for these names is the advisory and coordinating groups that meet under U.S. Government auspices to plan for U.S. participation in international conferences. Another source is the rosters requested earlier by the IWY Commission from Government agencies which suggest qualified delegates in their areas.
Women's Groups. Women's voices are seldom heard in Government on the global issues of food, energy, population, disarmament, and environment, which directly affect their lives. Nongovernmental women's organizations are deeply concerned with and knowledgeable on many international issues and could make important contributions to policy formation.
U.N. Commission on the Status of Women An all-male United Nations group of 26 experts charged with restructuring the U.N.'s economic and social development work recommended abolishing all of the functional commissions, including the Commission on the Status of Women.
This commission, which should be retained, has brought improvements in the status of women and focused international attention on the contributions of women in development. Its work has resulted in many significant documents on international policy, including the Convention on Political Rights of Women (1952), the Convention on the Nationality of Married Women (1957), the Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage, and Registration of Marriages (1962), the Convention for Suppression of Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of Prostitution of Others (1950), and the Convention on the Recovery Abroad of Maintenance (1956).
Very few women have represented the United States on the governing boards of U.N. organizations and specialized agencies.
Women employees at the United Nations have noted a sharp contrast between the organization's professed goals of equality for women and its practices, both in its international programs and in its discriminatory employment and promotion patterns within the Secretariat and U.N. agencies.
Women in Development The work of women is essential to every society even though it is largely unpaid and uncounted in the gross national product. Women bear and rear the children who are the world's basic resource for economic growth, and they have the critical responsibility for managing population growth in a world of diminishing resources and increasing poverty.
According to the U.N. Economic and Social Council, Third World women living in predominately rural societies have added burdens. These women produce 40 to 80 percent of the food and carry, in addition, major responsibility for family nutrition, health care, water supply and sanitation, and the education of the young. Although this contribution is central to any development, it has been largely ignored by their own governments as well as in programs of assistance set up by the United States Agency for International Development and similar organizations.
New techniques and training programs have been introduced
to increase male employment and productivity. In agriculture, new methods,
machinery, marketing programs, and farm credit are made available to men who
either supplant women in their traditional jobs, lowering women's status and
depriving them of small incomes
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New factories lure men to city jobs, leaving women behind as the heads and usually as sole support of their families. In fact, almost 30 percent of rural families in the Third World are now headed by women. Young women frequently migrate to enter the urban labor force as menials or prostitutes or, if they work in factories, they tend to be exploited by the policies and operations of multinational corporations.
These poor, neglected women are caught in a depressing downward spiral, Because they must work harder for less money, they have even less time for what little education is available to them. UNESCO has been reported that the illiteracy rate among women of the world has actually grown in the last 15 years from 58 to 62 percent.
U.S. Action. The United States has recognized the importance of women in developing nations. Recent amendments to foreign assistance legislation known as the "Percy Amendments" require U.S. assistance programs to consider their impact on the women of the countries affected, include women as beneficiaries and participants, and refrain from any programs that would affect women adversely.
AID plans for implementing this policy call for clear statements about the involvement of women in every program and preference for projects that use women in technical and managerial positions.
Human Rights Treaties and Conventions In spite of the preamble to the U.N. charter, many of its articles, and multinational treaties supporting basic human rights and freedoms, gross violations of the human rights of women continue to occur throughout the world. These include physical and sexual abuse, imprisonment, and torture for political reasons.
A majority of the following International Conventions on Women have not been ratified by the United States:
United Nations Conventions:
Convention on the Nationality of Married Women (1957). U.S. action: none.
Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage, and Registration of Marriage (1962). U.S. action: signed but never submitted to the Senate.
ILO Discrimination (Employment and Occupation) Convention (1958). U.S. action: none.
ILO Convention on Equal Remuneration (1951). U.S. action: none.
Convention on the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation or the Prostitution of Others (1951). U.S. action: none.
UNESCO Convention Against Discrimination in Education (1962). U.S. action: none.
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965). U.S. action: none.
Convention on the Recovery Abroad of Maintenance (1957). U.S. action: none.
U.N. Convention on the Political Rights of Women (1952). U.S. action: ratified January 22, 1976 by the Senate; went into force for the United States on July 7, 1976.
Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery (1956). U.S. action: ratified December 6, 1967.
Organization of American States (OAS) Conventions:
Inter-American Convention on the Granting of Political Rights to Women (1948). U.S. action: ratified January 22, 1976; went into force for the United States on July 7, 1976.
Civil Rights of Women (1948). U.S. action: none.
Nationality of Women (1933). U.S. action: ratified with reservations June 30, 1934.
(Dates in parentheses are dates of adoption by U.N./OAS)
Peace and Disarmament World military expenditures approached $370 billion in 1977, according to Ruth Sivard, World Military and Social Expenditures, 1977 (W.M.S.E. Publications, Box 1003, Leesburg, Virginia 22075.) She calculates that this amounts to $370 a minute since the birth of Christ.
Military spending on this scale is unprecedented in a time of comparative peace. At the present rate, the average U.S. citizen can expect to work three or four years of his or her life to pay for the arms race, in addition to the huge indirect costs of diverting resources to nonproductive uses.
It is obvious that a great many human needs could be provided for with the money now spent on the military. Sivard has calculated, for instance, that the world spends 60 times as much on equipping each soldier as on educating each child, and six times as much on military research as it spends for energy research. The world carries more insurance against the potential of war than against the actual, immediate problems of crime, illness, hunger, and poverty.
Developing Nations. Developing nations account for about one-fifth of the world expenditure on arms and spend as much on their military programs as they do on education and health care combined. Much of this money is spent in the United States. According to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the United States sold $29 billion worth of arms to developing nations between 1966 and 1975.
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President Carter has announced his intention of reducing our arms sales abroad, but a backlog of orders, a burgeoning arms industry, and political decisions work to accelerate the arms race in developing countries.
Nuclear Stockpile. The United States and the Soviet Union, the world's two nuclear giants, have a nuclear force capable of destroying the other several times over. The United States alone has a nuclear arms stockpile equivalent to 615,000 times the force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in World War II.
Five countries are known to have nuclear weapons, and 30 others may soon be able to make nuclear weapons by using plutonium from nuclear reactors and widely available technology.
Disarmament and Women. The momentum of the arms race propels us toward the catastrophe of nuclear war. As a leader in that race, the United States must work with the Soviet Union and other nuclear powers to build a peaceful world. We must move with all possible speed to distinguish what we can do by ourselves, what we must do in partnership with the Soviet Union, and what measures must await the concurrence of other countries.
Women have a financial as well as a human interest in detente. Disarmament could release funds for programs affecting their welfare which now are stalled for lack of money: quality education, child care, national health insurance, subsidized housing, and help for women returning to the work force.
Women are often frustrated in their attempts to make the world safer and more peaceful partly because they are not consulted when foreign policy decisions are made. But as private citizens and members of voluntary organizations they can raise their voices, do their homework, argue the case against massive armament, and support disarmament initiatives.
International Education and Communication In spite of a great deal of demographic, economic, and social data, information explaining the actual situation of women around the world is not readily available.
Americans get little news about events outside their own country. Newspaper coverage of international events, for instance, averages a half column of newsprint a day. Only three percent of undergraduate college students take courses dealing with international affairs, and according to a survey by the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, only five percent of teachers are exposed to international perspectives in preparing for certification.
This information gap makes it difficult for American women to understand the impact of development programs on women in developing countries, or even how to find out more about women in other cultures, let alone what they can do about it. There is, however, an available remedy.
Almost every American woman belongs to at least one voluntary organization—a PTA, a church group, a political group, a labor union, a civic organization, or a professional association. Most of these are also affiliated with a national parent group whose membership may run into hundreds of thousands or millions. The voice of that united membership can definitely be heard by governments.
A worldwide communications network of women organizations could help to foster increased international understanding of women's lives and concerns and establish a roster of resource women throughout the world.
International Women's Decade The United Nations Decade for Women, 1975-1985, is an outgrowth of the World Conference of the International Women's Year held by the United Nations in Mexico City in 1975. The World Plan of Action, adopted unanimously at that conference and later by the U.N. General Assembly, targeted such areas as education, employment, and health for special attention at a Mid-Decade Conference scheduled for 1980 in Iran.
In preparation, a system of progress reporting has been set up to guide governments and intergovernmental bodies. Within the U.N. system, agencies are directed to assess the impact of their programs on women. A new agency, the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women, has been proposed to provide data and training. The United States is among the countries that have contributed to the Institute, but it awaits $3 million in pledges before it can begin operation.
Encouraged by women's voluntary organizations, the U.S. Congress has made a pledge to the Voluntary Fund for the Decade. The Fund goes primarily to support projects undertaken by women themselves in the regions, but requests for its use have lagged because they come through governments, and governments have not paid much attention to women projects.
Since the U.N. Decade for Women comes from a U.S. initiative at the United Nations and bears the unanimous endorsement of all governments, the United States is obligated to support the Decade and urge other members to do the same.
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