Women and Girls

"UN asks members to 'invest in women and girls"
Friday, Mar 5 2008
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=388691

Summary:
Recently, the UN chief Ban Ki-moon has lent his support to a worldwide drive to invest in women and girls to foster gender equality. He argues that this will help to fight poverty, hunger, illiteracy, environmental degradation and diseases, which are the goals of the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. This program exists all across America, Asia and Africa, and will start to introduce to Middle East, including Saudi Arabia. When this program works out efficiently worldwide, Ban claimed that this will bring out multiplier effect on productivity and sustained economic growth.

Analyze:
In the past, women were not even considered as human. They stayed at their homes, watching over their children, or worked at poorly-conditioned factories to support their families. Also, they held no power at all and they followed what men told them to do. In contrast to the women, men lived such flourish lives. They were the ones who held social powers in various fields, from medical to politics. Such power gave them to dominate the society, giving no power to women because men thought women could not do anything.
Fortunately, such conditions altered in the modern society. I believe women take more important roles in these days than they did in the old days. For instance, in the presidential campaign in the U.S, there’s a first woman candidate, Hilary Clinton, who fights with other male candidates. This would have been seemed completely nonsense in the past, however, because our world changed since then, we can see more equality among genders.
Then, does gender equality actually help the society to develop as the UN chief Ban Ki-moon stated? I believe it does because in the developing countries, sexism still exists. For instance, in Korea, because people are conservative, they believe men should hold greater power than women do. Such views cause hinder them from development.
Hence, I believe Ban’s proposal is an effective strategy that will fight poverty, hunger, illiteracy, environmental degradation and diseases because the society will become more competitive and children will grow up in an improved family conditions.