In the debate over immigration, they are virtually unheard, unseen: the hundreds of thousands of foreign-born women, many of them in the US illegally, who toil in America’s homes as nannies, cooks and housekeepers, changing diapers and scrubbing floors, AP said.
They are jobs of last resort for people whose other options are few. The lucky ones earn decent wages, and build a promising future for their families.
The less fortunate, isolated and apprehensive, suffer a dismaying array of abuses--from expletively low wages to sexual harassment. Some are forced to sleep in closets; others are threatened with deportation if they complain about overwork.
“These people can be very, very vulnerable, particularly if they’re not documented,“ said Sam Dunning, who oversees social justice programs for the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Galveston-Houston. “If there’s any dispute over working conditions, they have very little recourse.“
It is, in Dunning’s words, a job sector in the shadows--generally excluded from state and federal labor protections.
Experts and activists agree the ranks of household workers are swelling--likely to more than 1 million--although tallying their exact numbers and regulating their workplaces is near-impossible. Employers commonly seek off-the-books arrangements, avoiding contributions toward Social Security or Medicare, and many undocumented women prefer working in the underground economy to minimize chances of deportation.
In one particularly grim case, a wealthy couple went on trial last week on New York’s Long Island, on federal charges related to the alleged abuse of two Indonesian women brought to the United States as housekeepers. Prosecutors say the women were held as virtual slaves, beaten, and paid no wages except for $100 a month sent to relatives abroad.
Working conditions were harsh enough to drive Tomasa Compean away from a housekeeping job in Houston that she’d held for 18 years. Over that span her pay edged up from $30 to $50 a day, but her assigned cleaning duties kept increasing and she felt pressured to work even when sick.

The project, which involves a total expenditure of Rs 15.410 million, is being implemented with help of NGOs.

The Women Development Ministry has successfully completed a computer-training program for 31, 00 women councilors under its IT training project, hoping they would play a more effective role at the grassroots level.
The ambitious project, which involved a total expenditure of Rs 15.410 million, was implemented with help of NGOs. National Project Manger Farzana said that these women representatives were trained in basic computer courses and skills to enable them to utilize information technology for their convenience being public leaders, reported APP.
She said that from Punjab, 1379 women councilors, 750 from Sindh, 413 from Balochistan and 542 from NWFP were made conversant with computer through five-day workshops throughout the country. About the eligibility for the training program, she said that Secondary School Certificate (SSC) was mandatory for those who belonged to developed areas while lady councilors hailing from underdeveloped districts had middle-level education only.
Replying to a question, she dispelled the impression that only 31,00 women councilors were literate in the country, adding that several were having higher education and were already well equipped with computer skills.

Sanou Top, driver of a "taxi sister" drives in central Dakar.

Nearly a dozen young veiled women have recently slipped behind the wheel of taxis in the Senegalese capital in the government’s latest initiative to drive gender equality forward.
But as they take to Dakar’s streets in their shiny new Chinese-made cars, the women are finding that the road to changing social attitudes in this socially conservative country on Africa’s Atlantic coast is bumpy, reported AFP.
“It’s a women’s revolution,“ says one of the young drivers Sanou Top, 25, sporting a pair of red pants with a matching red-yellow stripped Muslim headscarf.
The women vow, in their own way, to give a much-needed facelift to Senegal’s taxi sector known for its old, battered and smoky cars. But as she maneuvers her way through the traffic there are ample signs attitudes towards women in the workplace still have a long way to go: heads turn, people stare and point at her in amazement.
“It’s like this every day, people turn, point at us saying look ’it’s a woman driving a taxi’,“ says Top. Another driver Ma Djiguene Samba, 29, says male colleagues make nasty remarks and harass them on the road.
Launched last month, the Taxi Sister project is but the latest effort by the Senegalese government to promote gender equality. The numbers of female senators last month doubled to a record 40 percent after President Abdoulaye Wade named women to more than half of the 65 appointed seats for a recreated upper house of assembly.
Last week the Senegalese army began enlisting for the first time in its history, women foot soldiers, in a drive aimed at recruiting 300 by the end of the year for a 2,400-strong new contingent.
At the beginning of the year 50 women made history by joining the ranks of the country’s paramilitary police force. But critics see these changes as just cosmetic. The men who are in power “have to show that they are doing lots of things to change the position of women, but in fact it is a patriarchal order in this country,“ says Penda Mbow, a leading historian, gender and democracy lobbyist.

Farmers harvesting Saffron flowers in Iran's south Khorasan province

From a sumptuous gown of the last Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna to a peasant-style smock worn by Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, a new exhibition on the wives of Kremlin leaders illuminates a turbulent century.
The exhibition, “Russian First Ladies in the 20th Century“--opened at Moscow’s Museum of Contemporary History--displays clothes, jewelry, photographs and furniture relating to these women who stood, mostly silently, by their husbands, but also symbolized their times, wrote AFP.
“Such an exhibition would have been unimaginable before. Under the tsars these things were kept in the family. Under the Bolsheviks affairs of the heart were not discussed,“ said Larisa Vasilyeva, author of a book entitled “Kremlin Spouses.“
The exhibition starts with a glimpse inside the pampered tsarist household and the life of German-born Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna.
With the imperial household swept away--Alexandra was shot by Bolshevik agents in 1918--the exhibition turns to Soviet first families, starting with the austere Krupskaya.
Her personal effects include a briefcase of letters from her husband, revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, notable less for their poetic qualities than as political testimony.
Then there are letters written by brutal Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, and a stiff photograph of the two “relaxing“ by the sea, a few years before she committed suicide in 1932.
A sunnier picture emerges with the wife of modernizing leader Nikita Khrushchev, Nina.
She is seen reveling in a visit to the United States, while a stylish yellow-trimmed leather suitcase suggests the age of austerity is coming to an end.
The optimism of that age is dimmed however as the exhibition moves to the nearly two-decade reign of Leonid Brezhnev and his wife Victoria, who appears dour and dependable, not least during a visit to a Soviet fashion studio with the wife of Richard Nixon, Pat.
“She knew how to make cakes and jam: such a first lady was needed in a period of stagnation,“ commented Vasilyeva.
The mood is transformed with the arrival of Raisa Gorbachev, the last Soviet first lady, who manages to steal the show from her retiring post-Soviet successors, Naina Yeltsina and Lyudmila Putina.

Vietnam’s preference for boys over girls is further tipping the balance between the sexes in Asia, already skewed by a strong bias for boys among Chinese and Indians. The trend could lead to increased trafficking of women and social unrest, a UN report says.
Vietnam is now positioned where China was a decade ago, logging about 110 boys born to every 100 girls in a country where technology is readily available to determine the sex of a fetus and where abortion is legal, according to research released this week by the UN Population Fund, Unfpa.org reported.
The sex ratio at birth generally should equal about 105 boys to 100 girls, according to the report.
“The consequences are already happening in neighboring countries like China, South Korea and Taiwan. They have to import brides,“ said Tran Thi Van, assistant country representative of the Population Fund in Hanoi, adding that many brides are coming from Vietnam. “I don’t know where Vietnam could import brides from if that situation happened here in the next 10 or 15 years.“
The report, which looked at China, India, Vietnam and Nepal, warned that tinkering with nature’s probabilities could cause increased violence against women, trafficking and social tensions.
It predicted a “marriage squeeze,“ with the poorest men being forced to live as bachelors.
Gender imbalance among births has been rising in parts of Asia since the 1980s, after ultrasound and amniocentesis provided a way to determine a fetus’ sex early in pregnancy. Despite laws in several countries banning doctors from revealing the baby’s sex, many women still find out and choose to abort girls.
“I have noticed that there have been more and more boys than girls,“ said Truong Thi My Ha, a nurse at Hanoi’s Maternity Hospital. “Most women are very happy when they have boys, while many are upset if they have girls.“
In China, the 2005 estimate was more than 120 boys born to 100 girls, with India logging about 108 boys to 100 girls in 2001, when the last census was taken. However, pockets of India have rates of 120 boys. In several Chinese provinces, the ratio spikes to more than 130 boys born to 100 girls.
Reports of female infanticide still surface in some poor areas of countries and death rates are higher among girls in places like China, where they are sometimes breast-fed for shorter periods, given less health care and vaccinations and even smaller portions of food than their brothers, the report said.
It estimated Asia was short of 163 million females in 2005 when compared to overall population balances of men and women elsewhere in the world. It said sex ratios at birth in other countries, such as Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh, also should be closely monitored to avoid uneven trends there.
Earlier research has documented the gender imbalance in the region. A UNICEF report last year estimated 7,000 girls go unborn every day in India.

Women-only subway carriages will be reintroduced in South Korea’s capital to try to curb sexual harassment of female passengers, officials said.
Operators of Seoul’s eight subway lines introduced women-only carriages in 1992, but the system was suspended just months later due to “structural problems in operations,“ a Seoul Metro spokesman told AFP.
“Previously, it had been impossible to stop male passengers from using women-only carriages during the rush hour,“ he said.
Subway authorities plan next year to designate two carriages of each train exclusively for women, he said.
Last week a parliamentary committee called on the city government to reintroduce women-only carriages, saying incidents of sexual harassment account for nearly half of all subway crimes.

A new study has found that depression and anxiety disorders during childhood may increase the risk of obesity during adulthood for women but not men.
The study, by a team of researchers led by Sarah E. Anderson, M.S., from Tufts University, was carried out on a group of 820 people--403 women and 417 men--who were assessed four times between 1983 and 2003.
The participants ranged in age from 9 to 18 years at the beginning of the study, and were 28 to 40 years old at the most recent assessment, Hindustantimes.com reported.
The researchers evaluated the association between anxiety disorders and depression and weight gain from childhood into adulthood.
As a part of the study, they interviewed the individuals to determine whether they met clinical criteria for anxiety disorders or depression, and calculated BMI-for-age (BMI z scores), that correspond to growth chart percentiles and allow for tracking a child’s relative weight through adolescence, by dividing weight in kilograms by the square of height in meters and adjusting it for age and gender based on national reference data.
The team found that 310 participants--119 men and 191 women--had anxiety disorders and 148--50 men and 98 women--were depressed, and that women with anxiety disorders had significantly higher BMI z scores than women of the same age and socioeconomic status without the condition.
They also found that women with a history of depression, and those who had developed depression at a younger age, were heavier than women without depression, and also those who had developed depression later.
The researchers now suggest that treating anxiety and depression in girls and women may be one strategy in the battle against obesity.
“Our results suggest that efforts to improve mental health in populations may also help prevent female obesity,“ they said.