WOMEN’S RIGHTS – STILL AN ISSUE
Some people say that feminism (or the fight for women’s rights) ended in the nineties. They say that it has already done its work. However, according to the Lithuanian Equal Rights Centre, there are still cases of women being mistreated in the spheres of economic and social life. These cases suggest that people in Lithuania need to reconsider the issues of the equal rights movement.
According to the United Nations Organization, women make up about a half of
f the population of the world and do two thirds of all the work. However, they earn only one tenth of the world’s income and own less than one hundredth of all the property. When people say that a woman’s work is never finished they mean that a woman spends twelve hours a day and seven days a week doing the shopping, the laundry, and the cleaning-up. What is more, these duties do not make even a half of the wo
ork paid for. These figures suggest that women all over the world – and especially in Eastern Europe where they have long been treated as being inferior – are working harder than men but nonetheless still have not managed to catch up wi
Moreover, as the International Women’s Organization reports, women and men often occupy different job positions. Very often women get less paid, less qualified, and less prestigious jobs. It is typical today in a company to see a man as a boss and a woman as his secretary. The reason for this is that a lot of women from the developing post-soviet countries ha
ave no access to high education because parents can only afford to pay one child’s education bills and most of the time it is the son’s, not the daughter’s. Meanwhile, the daughter stays at home and helps around the house. Because of the reasons like this, as the United Nations Organization had estimated, two thirds of the world’s illiterate are women.
Furthermore, all over the world the United Nations Organization has noticed the process of the so-called “poverty feminization”. This me

In addition, women complain th
Although these problems exist, the Industrial Revolution has introduced some positive changes for the woman as well. First of all, it has made machinery work more important than manual. This meant that physical strength wa
A partial solution to women’s problems could simply be the change of the attitude in the society. Lithuanian men should be more aware of the fact that it is family welfare that matters most, not the so-called “womanly” and “manly” roles. Thus such things as income rate or career prospects should be taken into consideration when, for example, deciding who should stay at home with a child. However, Lithuanian society has been led by men for so long that it is not that simple to convince them that women must have the same rights as they do. Therefore, one must start the changes from the educational level if they want to make sure women and men are treated equally in Lithuania.
One of the best ways of helping women attain better-paid and more qualified job positions is establishing special centres for girls and women so that they would be more motivated to gain high education. For example, in Vilnius University there is a Gender Study Centre where such disciplines as gender sociology or the philosophy of feminism are being taught. Established in 1992, the centre was a great start in the Baltic States, and in no time more of them were established in Latvia and Estonia. Such initiative could be an example for other universities, public and private organizations. It could also be a guide for an individual initiative, if one has some money and wants to make a good and necessary investment towards a better life of women in Lithuania. Good education nowadays is the most important criterion when employing a person – be it a woman or a man. So, if people fight the problem of women’s illiteracy, they can also fight the problems of “poverty feminization” and men’s attitude.