Statistics are a powerful and shocking tool for grasping the scale of the denial of women’s human rights, and the extent to which so many women are expected to be 'seen and not heard'.
Violence against women
- Violence causes more death and disability worldwide amongst women aged 15-44 than war, cancer, malaria or traffic accidents (Directorate of Public Health)
- One in three women worldwide has been beaten, coerced into sex, or abused in some other way, most often by someone she knows. One in four women were abused during pregnancy (Amnesty International; www.amnesty.org)
- In the UK, in 1999, 37% of female homicide victims were killed by their present or former partner, compared to 6% of men. This totalled 92 women – one every three days (www.homeoffice.gov.uk)
- Three out of four fatalities of war are women and children (Network for good)
- In the former Yugoslavia, 20,000 women and girls were raped during the first months of the war (Physicians for Human Rights)
- Between 200,000-300,000 women are trafficked to Europe every year (Human Rights Watch)
- Well over $7 billion a year is generated from sex-trade trafficking (Peace Women)
You can find more statistics relating to violence against women below.
Women at home- 1 out of 7 married women worldwide are raped by their spouse and marital rape accounts for 25% of all rapes (Wesley Center for Women)
- Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury and death for women worldwide (Intervarsity press)
- Every day 6,000 girls undergo female circumcision (Amnesty; www.amnesty.org)
- Reproductive health services for all women would cost $12 billion a year – as much as is spent on perfumes in Europe and the US every year (www.agi-usa.org ; Alan Guttmacher Institute)
- 16.4 million women in the world are living with HIV and AIDS (U.S. Pharmacist; www.uspharmacist.com)
- 55% of all HIV positive adults in sub-Saharan Africa are women (Afrol; www.afrol.com)
- Around half of pregnant women in Southern Asia and one third of women in many countries in Africa receive no antenatal care (UNAIDS; www.unaids.org)
- Around 60% of women in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia have no skilled attendant present when they give birth (UNICEF; www.unicef.org)
- One woman dies every minute from pregnancy related causes, most of which are preventable (RHRC; www.rhrc.org)
- 2 million females are killed before or at birth simply because of their sex (www.indiafemalefoeticide.org)
- More than 60 million women are ‘missing’ from the world today as a result of sex-selective abortions and female infanticide (Amnesty; www.amnesty.org)
- 50 million women are ‘missing’ from India (www.thp.org)
- In China, the 2000 census revealed the ratio of girls to boys is 100:199. The norm is 100:103 (chinadatacenter.org)
- Of 8,000 foetuses aborted in a Bombay clinic, 7999 were female (learningpartnership.org)
- Annually, 2 million girls worldwide are forced into marriage (secondsightresearch.tripod.com)
- 5,000 women in the world are estimated as killed in ‘honour killings’ (Christian Science Monitor; www.csmonitor.com)
- Every year in India, 5000 brides are murdered or commit suicide because their marriage dowries are considered inadequate (www.learningpartnership.org)
- Every year, 2 million girls between the ages of five and 15 are coerced, abducted, sold or trafficked into the illegal sex market (International Humanitarian Campaign Against the Exploitation of Children; www.helpsavekids.org)
- More than half of women in the world, over the age of 15, cannot read or write (Women’s Learning Partnership; www.learningpartnership.org)
- Two thirds of people who cannot read or write are women (Women-watch; www.un.org)
- Two thirds of the children who receive less than four years’ education are girls (Women’s Learning Partnership; www.learningpartnership.org)
- Nearly 60% of children not in school are girls (Women’s Learning Partnership; www.learningpartnership.org)
- Women produce nearly 80% of the food on the planet, but receive less than 10% of agricultural assistance (Peacekeeper; www.iamapeacekeeper.com)
- More than 1 billion people live in abject poverty on less than $1 a day. 70% of people in abject poverty are women (www.kamilat.org)
- Only 1% of the world’s assets are in the name of a woman (SEWA; www.unesco.org)
- Although women do two thirds of the work in the world, the rate of paid employment for women is two thirds that of men (International Labor Organization; www.ilo.org)
- There is no country in the world where women’s wages are equal to those of men (Women’s Learning Partnership; www.learningpartnership.org)
- Worldwide, when women do the same work as men, they are paid 30-40% less than men (Feminism; www.newint.org)
- Women occupy only 2% of senior management positions in business worldwide (Businessweek; www.businessweek.com)
- Only 15% of parliamentary seats across the world are held by women (www.globalpolicy.org)
- Women ministers remain concentrated in social areas (14%) compared to legal (9.4%), economic (4.1%), political affairs (3.4%) and the executive (3.9%) (www.un.org)
- 3.5% of the world’s cabinet ministers are women and women have no ministerial positions in 93 countries worldwide (Feminism; www.newint.org)
- Saudi Arabia denied its 179,564 women the right to vote in 2004 (Amnesty International; www.amnesty.org)
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