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POPULATION: Better for Women Also Better for Men

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Oct 12 2005 (IPS) - Development needs a new boost – a change in male attitudes, says Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, executive director of the United Nations Population Fund.

“The two come together in a very natural way that we don’t think about,” Obaid told IPS ahead of the launch of the UNFPA report urging the need for better gender relations in order to achieve better development.

“In order to make poverty history, everyone has to be engaged,” Obaid said. But in many developing countries women are not able to access education and health, particularly reproductive health. That can be a consequence of a male attitudes, but it also has consequences for developing the right male attitude, she said.

“Male attitudes are very important,” said Obaid. “All of us learn our roles very young. Therefore should start very early to change perceptions of how men and women relate to each other, in school and at home as well, and look at the whole pressure that is upon men to be ‘macho’ and be violent.”

Men lose much through this macho culture, Obaid said. Among other things, “they are denied the role of being father, of parenting, of taking care of children and being part of that process.”

Changing male attitudes can be good for women, for the men, and for society. UNFPA does its bit in its own way, Obaid said.

“We work through the United Nations Population Fund, for example, with the police; we work with other partners; we work with lawyers so that they can incorporate the laws that protect women.”

But Obaid stressed, “we need to put it in a way that if women are well and healthy, it is good for the men, it is good for the family as a whole, it is good for the community and the country.”

The men need to see this change as a gain, not a loss, she said. “I don’t think this should be seen as the power of men taken away, but rather that they can have a better relationship and share happiness in life. I don’t think it takes away anything, I think it makes a better, stable relationship.”

But while the aim is noble, the means are less easy to agree. One way, Obaid said, is to promote the right kind of male role models. “We have to work with men who are positive, who want to see change, and have them as role models for other men.”

Women are already the focus of several of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), Obaid said. “We have the goal of poverty, the goal of maternal health, reducing HIV… in all these you will see that if we improve the condition of women, we will move towards achieving these goals.”

Eight MDGs were established by world leaders at the U.N. Millennium Summit in 2000. The deadline for achieving the goals, which include halving extreme hunger and poverty, is 2015.

Better health cannot come without ensuring that health services related to pregnancy and reproduction are in place, Obaid said. “We have to ensure that we are moving towards that aim so that the health system can serve them better.”

The face of HIV is increasingly the face of women who are young and unmarried, “so we have to put steps in place so that women are able to protect themselves; they are able to talk to their partners.”

The situation in developed societies is not always better. “If you take one indicator such as violence against women, it is there in both societies: developing and developed. It can take different forms. But basically it’s the same issue, that women are vulnerable, and society allows men to be more powerful.”

But one difference is that in developed societies men are “wary of a judicial system that does follow up on these issues, while in developing countries we need to work more to ensure that the perpetrators of violence do not get away with it.”

Obaid said male attitudes are not a particularly Islamic problem. “I don’t think you can describe this as a problem in a Muslim, or Christian or Buddhist or whatever,” she said. “The issue is that where there is poverty, male behaviour becomes worse. And in many Muslim countries they are the poor sector of the countries.”

Obaid, who comes from a Muslim family, said the real issue is how society itself is constructed. “It is much more a cultural issue than it is a religious issue.”

Given three billion people under the age of 24, “we want to work with the young so that they can provide help to each other, and guidance to each other. We are also talking about an intergenerational dialogue in order to improve an understanding of the feminist movement. So we certainly need to work with men at the community level as well.”

Where women are involved in political participation or participation at the community level, “we have seen that they do provide decisions that are family friendly,” Obaid said.