Doubts are emerging over whether cash transfers, designed to strengthen local markets, also empower women and change gender roles in emergencies. "Gender relations are quite complex and you cannot assume US$50 is going to change that," Sarah Bailey, research officer at the Humanitarian Policy Group, told IRIN. "You cannot assume targeting women necessarily leads to their empowerment or promotes Gender Equality." According to a joint report by Oxfam Great Britain and Concern...

Senior United Nations officials today stressed the need to promote the participation of women in decision-making, noting that democracy and Gender Equality are interlinked and mutually reinforcing. “While women’s political participation improves democracy, the reverse is also true: democracy is an incubator for Gender Equality,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in his remarks at a roundtable held at UN Headquarters on Gender Equality and democracy. “It provides public space for discussion of human...

Patriarchal societies are part of the problem of altered sex ratios, female infanticide and foeticide. This needs to be acknowledged and changed. India's sex ratio, among children aged 0-6 years, is alarming. The ratio has declined from 976 females (for every 1000 males) in 1961 to 914 in 2011. Every national census has documented a decline in the ratio, signalling a ubiquitous trend. Preliminary data from the 2011 census have recorded...

Low on economic progress, high on progressiveness. That sums up Darntoli, a tribal hamlet in Torpa block of Khunti district which clocked one of the highest sex ratios, 994 females for every 1,000 males in the 2011 Census, the provisional figures of which were released yesterday. According to 2001 Census, the figure was 971 females. The latest figures are much higher than the state average of 947 and the national average of...

Stating that there were “fewer women then men in India,” President Pratibha Patil on Thursday cautioned that if this trend continued it would have a negative impact on society. Punjab and Haryana were already seeing the “implications,” she said delivering the Dr. V.N. Tewari Memorial Oration on ‘Women as drivers of a rising India' at the Panjab University here. The President said: “An agenda for empowerment of women should cover gender needs...