Global Gender Issues

Using history, storytelling, visual imagery and other narrative techniques, this book aims to identify differences of power, violence, employment and resources between the sexes. Viewed through the "lens of gender", argue the authors, world politics take on a very different shape; beneath the surface of the inter-state power-mongering known as "international relations" are the women whose presence is still largely unacknowledged, whose "power", if they have any, is still largely informal. The book offers a comparison of the inequalities experienced by women wielding traditional international power as heads of state, with those suffered by women in positions of less visible state and non-state power, and with the billions of women whose contribution as mothers and workers accords them no formal political power at all. The authors then proceed to a radical argument: that these inequalities are linked to such world political issues as wars of secession, arms proliferation, global economic recession and environmental degradation.