Global Patterns in the Achievement of Women's Human Rights to Equality

Abstract

The large attendance and extensive press coverage of the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women serves as an illustration of the growing interest in the topic of womens human rights around the globe. Increased popular interest in womens human rights issues has been paralleled by the proliferation of scholarly books and journal articles on the topic. Much of this literature addresses the topic of womens rights from the perspective of the international lawyer and deals with international laws and organizations that seek to forward the cause of womens rights. There is also some work conducted by social scientists who use traditional nonquantitative research methods but unfortunately there are only a few systematic empirical studies that have addressed questions related to womens human rights. The topic of womens human rights remains a topic in need of much more systematic empirical research. The lack of much quantitative social scientific research is somewhat puzzling because recent years have seen much work aimed toward achieving the goal of a theoretically driven and empirically supported understanding of why other classes of human rights are realized. One vein of research has focused on explaining cross-national variations in the class of human rights relating to personal integrity guaranteed in the UN Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and including the rights not to be imprisoned tortured or killed either arbitrarily or for ones political views. Several cross-national studies have focused on a class of rights pertaining to the provision of basic human needs which have been addressed in international human rights treaties. Still other research has focused on whether countries foreign policies in the form of foreign aid and refugee policies are influenced by human rights concerns. (excerpt)