Facts

Did You Know?

Literacy
66% of the world's illiterate people are women.

Property Ownership
Women only own 1% of the land in the world.

Politics
Worldwide, only about 14% of members of parliament are women. 7% of the world's cabinet ministers are women.

Poverty
2.5 billion people (of the world's 6 billion people) are defined as "poor", that is living on less than US $2 a day. 70% of the world's poor are women.

HIV/AIDS
Today, young women are 1.6 times more likely to be living with HIV than young men, largely because of promiscuous men. Every minute, five young people between the ages of 15 and 24 are infected with HIV, three-quarters of them female.

In six African countries, (Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe), more than one in five of all pregnant women have HIV/AIDS. In Swaziland, nearly 40% of pregnant women are HIV-positive.

Female Genital Cutting
An estimated 135 million of the world's girls and women have undergone genital cutting (or, by many accounts, mutilation), and two million girls a year are at risk of mutilation - approximately 6,000 per day. It is practised extensively in Africa and is common in some countries in the Middle East. It also occurs, mainly among immigrant communities, in parts of Asia and the Pacific, North and Latin America and Europe.

Domestic Violence and Rape
Violence against women and girls is increasing. One in four women has experienced physical and sexual abuse by a male intimate. Every minute and a half in the United States, a woman is raped. In 141 countries, marital rape is a legal activity.

Employment
Unpaid work provided by women, such as time spent caring for family members, is estimated at US $11 trillion per year -- one-third of the global GDP.

In the UN system, women hold only 9% of the top management jobs and 21% of senior management positions, but 48% of the junior professional civil service jobs.

There are less than 10 women chief executives in the Fortune 500 corporations.

Income
Women in Africa contribute 75 percent of the agricultural work and produce and market 60 to 80 percent of the food. However, the female labour force in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, receives only 10 percent of the total income and owns only 1 percent of the assets. These figures clearly indicate the need for increasing women's access to both formal and informal income- and equity-producing opportunties.


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