In my country there is problem, and that problem is transport...

I thought today’s post would be about an event that was supposed to take place at my office. A large number of the women elected to the constituent assembly were supposed to come to a party here today, but the event was canceled due to the ongoing transportation strikes.

Either way, something that Susan "You Can't B. Serious" Anthony wrote the other day has gotten me thinking about some of the comparisons with women’s rights in Nepal as opposed to at home. In some ways, the situation is obviously much worse in Nepal. Female literacy rates are around 40% (it’s about 65% for Men), although that number seems to be improving. For adults, it’s lower, at about 35%, which suggests that educational access is slightly better than it has been in the past, but girls are still less likely to be in school than boys.

In some senses, while the Civil War helped change a lot of gender stereotypes here (women, who have had a hard time breaking barriers in the Nepali Armed Forces were active front-line soldiers in the Maoist forces), the calls for regional autonomy that emerged during the conflict and after seem likely to reinforce more traditional gender roles.

In the political arena, things are more complicated. While there is no serious female candidate for either the presidency or the prime minister (NB: It’s not clear what the division of the two jobs will be, and the current PM is supposed to be resigning today but it might not have happened, and they haven’t decided if they’ll even have a president or how they’ll be elected) but it’s hard to say if that is a function of the society or just the current people who happen to have had their names floated. Notably, India, which has similar notions of gender and a similarly disproportionate lack of educational access for women, has already had a female head of state.

On the other hand, women hold 191 seats in the ~600 person Constituent Assembly (The 110^th United States Congress has 74 women in the House and 16 in the Senate). I’m not sure what the final agreement looked like, but the major parties have generally agreed to run female candidates in at least 1/3 of their races, the problem of underrepresentation of women is recognized by all the major parties, and there is a consensus that this is a serious problem.

There is also a relatively strong network (or as strong a network as one can expect in a country where virtually nothing works and which has been a democracy for about 15 minutes) amongst the women in the CA, which crosses party lines in ways that are atypical and impressive here. There is a particular focus on female legislators being able to present a different view on all issues, not just those that are traditionally considered "women's issues."

As to the implications of all of this, your guess is as good as mine...

On a different topic, one of the pieces of feedback I got on the first draft of my report and a presentation I just gave was to look more closely at the constitutions of communist states. One highlight:

Article 35. Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.
-Constitution of the People's Republic of China, available at http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/constitution/constitution.html

Classic comedy.* Almost as funny as Henry Kissinger's Nobel Peace Prize.** The temptation to add a citation like "But see, e.g. People v. Tanks, 415 Tianamen Square 64 (1989) is pretty overwhelming.

*except for the whole denial of human rights to a large portion of humanity by a crypto-fascist oligarchy thing. that makes it less funny.

**also not actually funny.