
Last week, a United Nations working group released a report on discrimination against women in the US. Much of the coverage since has skimmed off the top, so I decided to read the whole report, taking a highlighter to it, and thinking to myself, "Well, gee, I'll just highlight the most egregious parts." Oh, how innocent I was! Now the entire document is covered in angry neon yellow (RIP, highlighter), because it turns out gender inequality in America is even worse than I—a professional feminist killjoy—believed it to be. If you're already having an awful Friday and want to make it worse, you can read the full report here. But you shouldn't have to, so here you go:
For starters, we rank only 72 globally in women's representation in government. The working group also expresses concern that "the political rhetoric of some of the candidates for the Presidency in the upcoming elections has included unprecedented hostile stereotyping of women," which all but screams Donald Trump red tent tantrum.
Then there's a lack of access to reproductive and sexual healthcare, and violence targeting abortion providers:
[M]any of the clinics work in conditions of constant threats, harassment and vandalising, too often without any kind of protection measures by law enforcement officials, as we observed during our visits to Texas and Alabama. Alabama has a history of severe violence against abortion providers including the killing of Dr. David Gunn, in 1993, the first doctor to be murdered for performing abortions in the United States. The recent massacre in the Colorado family planning centre, which occurred just before the start of our visit, once again demonstrated the extreme hostility and danger faced by family planning providers and patients.
UGH UGH UGH UGH UGH UGH UGH why do we tolerate this it is literally domestic terrorism
Did you know that the US' abysmal record on access to reproductive health care is categorized by the United Nations as a human rights violation? Here's what the report says: "We encourage steps to reconcile US laws on religious or conscience-based refusals to provide reproductive health care with international human rights law and to prohibit refusal to provide sexual and reproductive health services on grounds of religious freedom, where such refusal will effectively deny women immediate access to the health care to which they are entitled under both international human rights law and US law."
It gets worse: The report's conclusion is that women in America are "missing rights," but that this disproportionately affects marginalized women: "While all women are the victims of these missing rights, women who are poor, belong to Native American, Afro-American and Hispanic ethic minorities, migrant women, LGBTQ women, women with disabilities and older women are disparately vulnerable."
Also there's this lazy little gem:
We were informed that women own over one third of US firms, mainly in small and medium siz businesses. These businesses face greater barriers in obtaining low cost capital from sources such as the Small Business Administration and clearly need support in order to achieve qual economic potential. However, the Small Business Administration has a stated goal of awarding only 5 percent of federal contracts to women-owned businesses. Furthermore, it is reported that this goal has never been reached in practice.
Oregon was one of the states the commission visited on their exploratory trip to the US, and one of the approximately three bright spots in the document is that it frames many of Oregon's policies—e.g., sex education and voter registration—as progressive examples for the rest of the country. If only they didn't need one.