Prepared by The University of Iowa Center for Human Rights (UICHR)*

11 — Percent of married women in Zambia who thought that they could ask their husbands to use a condom if he was infected with HIV/AIDS (UNIFEM 2000)

26 — Percent of women in Bosnia & Herzegovina holding seats in their House of Representatives in 2000, up dramatically from a postwar low of only 2% a few years earlier (Human Rights Watch, 2000)

26.4 — Percent of the world’s women who were illiterate in 2000, down dramatically from 45.2% in 1970 but almost double the 14.7% of the world’s men who were illiterate in 2000 (UNESCO, 2001)

50 — Estimated percentage of what women earn as compared to men worldwide (United Nations, 2001)

58 — Percent of adult women in Turkey assaulted by an intimate partner in 1998 (UNIFEM and WHO, 2000)

80 — Percent of women in Senegal who were able to protect themselves from unsafe sex after participating in programs training them in the use of the female condom and negotiating skills (UNIFEM, 2000)

80 — Percent of the world’s estimated 23,000,000 refugees who are women and children (MADRE, 2001)

95 — Percent of aborted fetuses in a large Bombay hospital that were female in 2001 (Parthenia: International Domestic Violence, 2002)

168 — States who are party to the 1979 UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the United States not among them (United Nations, 2001)

7,000 — Deutsche marks (US $3,057) paid by a civilian in the NATO stabilization force (SFOR) in Bosnia to buy two women from a brothel owner in Bosnia (Human Rights Watch, 2001)

10,000 — Estimated number of Vietnamese women who have been sold to China to be wives of Chinese men or to work as maids or prostitutes (Ananova, 2001)

45,000-50,000 — Estimated number of women and children trafficked annually into the U.S. by crime rings and loosely connected criminal networks (Human Rights Watch, 2001)

16,400,000 — Estimated number of women living with HIV/AIDS today (UNIFEM, 2000)

1,050,000,000 — Estimated number of women worldwide that live on less than US $1 per day (United Nations, 2001)

 

*First published in The Iowa Review (Volume 32, Number 1) Spring 2002. Copyright © 2002 by The University of Iowa Center for Human Rights. For further information on human rights generally, please visit the UICHR web site.