Pay gap between male and female directors of companies and public bodies has widened in Britain, research indicates.
According to Telegraph.co.uk, professional women are still blocked by a “glass ceiling“ which sees them earn almost 27 percent less than their male counterparts.
The data suggests women’s progress at senior management level continues to be hampered by the demands of balancing work with bringing up a family. Where a man would earn an annual wage of £70,657, a woman with a similar position would earn £56,933.
A lack of well-paid part-time jobs, limited pension provision and shorter working lives mean that, compared with men, women are almost always short-changed.
For the whole working population, the gender pay gap has shrunk from 17.5 percent to 17.2 percent, according to figures from the Office of National Statistics.
The divide is most marked in senior management--where women earn 26.8 percent less per hour than their male equivalents. This equates to a salary of £48,651 for a male director, compared with just £35,588 for a woman in the same position.
Baroness Prosser, deputy chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said: “Women who work full-time are cheated of around £330,000 over the course of their lifetime.“ “Nationwide, women are less able to save for a pension, leaving them poverty-stricken in old age. The low wages of many single mums leaves them struggling.“
The ONS figures also show that jobs held by women were far more likely to pay below the minimum wage.

The Safi fur and wool factory, in Herat city, western Afghanistan, has more than 350 female and 300 male workers who earn only 300 Afghanis (US$6) for their 48-hour, six-day week. The factory produces coats, jackets, hats and other garments for the European and North American markets. There are more than 1,500 women working in four such factories in Herat city.
The air in the Safi processing plant is full of dust from dirty furs, which workers tear to pieces with their bare hands, reported IRIN.
Jamila (not hear real name) has worked in the factory for more than a year and recently experienced an unrelenting pain in her chest. “First, I was coughing and now I feel a terrible pain in my chest,“ the 32-year-old said.
“Doctors and medicine are expensive,“ she said. The modest amount she earns helps to supplement the family income to help feed her four children. Less than 2 meters away from where Jamila is working, her baby has fallen asleep on a thin piece of straw. Jamila brings her youngest son to the factory every day, because there is nobody to look after him at home.
Workers have to separate fur from goats’ hair and weave sheep’s wool without protective gloves or masks. Ahmad Zia Rahmani, a lung and chest diseases specialist at the Herat city hospital says workers in fur and wool factories are vulnerable to virulent microbes, which harm the respiratory system and cause chest infections.
“Sheep’s wool and goats’ hair usually contain harmful bacteria which can easily be transferred to a human via close contact and inhalation,“ Rahmani said.
Mothers who regularly breastfeed their babies and consume food at the factory can also transfer dangerous microbes to their children if they do not wash their hands with antibacterial soap, Rahmani added.
Afghanistan’s Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs (MoLSA) said it would send a delegation to Herat to assess and report on the situation of female workers in factories there, after IRIN approached the ministry for a comment.
According to Afghanistan’s labor law, public and private employers should provide medical insurance to employees who work in hazardous environments.
Almost all workers in factories in Herat province have no written contract with their employers, particularly in the private sector. Workers and employers have only verbal agreements, which do not cover medical and hazard insurance.
In the past 12 months, seven women workers of the wool and fur factories in Herat have died due to respiratory diseases and chest infections, workers and Mohammad Ibrahim Ghafori, an official at the Safi factory, said.

Iranian police cadets at a graduation ceremony in Tehran

Influential Malaysian Muslim women demanded a budget airline to swap its flight attendants’ miniskirts for less revealing, more Islamic attire in keeping with the multi-faith country’s dominant religion.
Female delegates of the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), during a debate on Islam at the final day of its week-long annual meeting, zeroed in on AirAsia’s stewardesses, saying their skirts should go down to the ankles, according to Reuters.
The 3.3-million-strong UMNO represents the country’s dominant ethnic Malays, who are by definition Muslim.
“The uniform is too revealing. We don’t want to look at their thigh and knee,“ said Zaleha Hussin, an elderly woman delegate from the northeastern state of Kelantan. “Malaysia is an Islamic nation and we are ashamed of the AirAsia uniform,“ she told the meeting.
Male delegates also supported the change of dress code. “It should be implemented by explaining that we are a Muslim country,“ said Azman Ruslan, a lawyer. AirAsia is one of Asia’s fastest-growing budget carriers and its crew is made up of various races, including Malay Muslims who form just over half of Malaysia’s 26 million people.
An AirAsia spokeswoman said the uniform did not compromise the staff’s national identity. “There’s nothing to comment about it. Wearing this uniform doesn’t make us less Malaysian,“ she said by telephone.
Malaysia has been for long a tolerant Muslim society and has Hindu, Buddhism and Christian followers. Women constitute half the country’s population.

One of the most common images of war is of women, uprooted from their homes, reeling from the effects of sexual violence and struggling to provide for their children in the harshest of environments.

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has appealed for 10 million dollars for a two-year initiative to help women and girls affected by conflicts and natural disasters.
“Neglecting women and girls in crisis makes no sense from a development perspective,“ UNDP Assistant Administrator and Director of the Crisis Bureau Kathleen Cravero said, reported Afriquenligne.fr.
“Not only do we fail to address the needs of half the population, we also fail to gain from their insights and resourcefulness during the critical stages of the recovery process,“ he added.
In seeking the funds, UNDP pointed to the disproportionate impact of crisis on women and girls, while underscoring their potential to contribute to solutions.
Cavero also stated: “One of the most common and disturbing images of war is of women, uprooted from their homes and communities, reeling from the effects of sexual violence and struggling to provide for their children in the harshest of environments.“
“But, if we continue to see women only as victims and not as problem solvers and decision makers, we do so at their peril, and at the peril of peace. We need to seize opportunities to build back better during the recovery period.“
The Pan African News Agency (PANA) learnt that the appeal is based on an 8-Point Agenda for Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality in Crisis Prevention.
The agenda deals with protecting women from violence in crisis; ensuring women have access to justice; strengthening women’s voices and representation, as well as building peace with and for women.
It also seeks to promote gender equality and putting women’s needs first in the recovery effort while urging governments to work for women and strengthening women’s networks in crisis.

South Korea’s central bank chose the face of Korean motherhood as the first woman to be featured on its banknotes.
Shin Saimdang, known for raising a famed Confucian scholar and having a deft hand in painting, will grace the new 50,000 won ($55) note when it debuts in early 2009, the Bank of Korea said, reported Reuters.
Women’s groups say her selection bolsters the idea that mothers should stay at home and devote their lives to their children’s education.
Shin, whose nickname is “wise mother,“ gave birth to the 16th-century scholar Yi I, also known by his pen name Yulgok. She is celebrated for placing her son on the path to fame.
A paper on a government website describes Shin as “the best example of motherhood in Korean history,“ while the central bank said she was selected “to promote gender equality and women’s participation in society.“

Only one researcher out of four is a woman according to the International Report “Science, Technology and Gender“ that UNESCO launched on 10 November during the Science Forum in Budapest. Ernesto Fernandez Polcuch, program specialist for science and technology at the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (Montreal, Canada) presents in this interview some of the most relevant findings of the report, wrote Portal.unesco.org.

What does this Report bring to light?
This Report presents the results of the first serious statistical survey on the relation between science, technology and gender at a global level. It allows us to come to various conclusions. First, the participation of women in science at the higher levels of education has increased in the past ten years in most regions of the world. However, once they have finished their studies, only 25 percent of researchers in science and technology are women and 75 percent men.
Second, findings vary from one region to another. Whereas Central Asia and, in general, the post-Soviet countries have good gender parity, as do many countries in Latin America, the same cannot be said of Africa and the rest of Asia. It is also clear that in the major part of Europe, above all in Western Europe, research is still predominantly male.

How can this be explained?
There are different reasons. In the case of Western Europe, for example, many researchers work for industry, where the percentage of women is low. Therefore, the European Union has pinpointed this as a specific problem.

But isn’t the desertion of science a general problem, without distinction of gender?
It is true that science attracts fewer students, but this is a trend and not yet reflected in the total number of researchers. At the university level, gender parity is much better than at the research level. Percentage wise, there are more women science students than researchers. After their studies, women change directions. In terms of statistics this is reflected in a “scissor diagram“: worldwide, the number of women decreases at the higher levels of scientific research. In certain countries, in the field of science, very few women are heads of department or academics, whereas there are more female than male graduates.

Are there differences with respect to salaries?
The data we have are not reliable enough to assert this. In general, when countries have strong public structures in the field of research, salary differences due to gender hardly occur, but this is not the case with industrial research. What we can say, is that working conditions in scientific research do not attract women. There are two reasons: problems of discrimination and problems with work organization: the work days do not accommodate family life.

Why do certain countries have good results?
Results have to be read with caution, because the data are general and don’t reflect different levels. For example, Argentina has a parity of 50 percent, but in the higher levels of scientific careers women are under-represented. The researcher’s status in society also enters into consideration: in certain countries, it is prestigious to be a researcher, whereas in others, above all in less developed countries, the profession is less well perceived. This is also related to salary levels. In countries where salaries of researchers are very low, the profession tends to be the second profession in the family, not the main breadwinner’s. When this is the case, it progressively becomes a female profession, without being the consequence of true parity and equal opportunity.

Which fields display the greatest disparities between men and women?
In the field of engineering, there are few women. However in biology and medicine, there are as many women as men, if not more. In the computer sciences also there are more menÉthe information society is still a society of men.

A survey of married Turkish women has found that 34.2 percent of them have been the victim of domestic violence at least once, AFP informs.
Four percent of those who said they were “slapped, pushed roughly or beaten“ by their husbands also said that this happens “often,“ according to the survey.
The highest rate of physical abuse--reported by almost 40 percent of the respondents--was in Turkey’s poorest eastern provinces, where patriarchal traditions remain strong.
The survey was conducted among 1,800 married women by academics from Istanbul’s Sabanci and Bogazici universities between January 2006 and June 2007.
Women’s rights are a major priority the European Union is pressing Turkey to address in its bid to join the bloc.