Skip to footer
Equality
The Monitor's View

Neighborly headwinds for the Taliban

While Afghanistan’s leaders roll back rights for women, gender equality is starting to reshape a region emerging from outdated social norms.

|
AP
Afghan women chant and hold signs of protest during a demonstration in Kabul, Afghanistan, March 26.
  • By the Monitor's Editorial Board

The ruling Taliban in Afghanistan took another step on Tuesday toward limiting the place of women by banning them from working for United Nations agencies in Afghan society. Two days earlier, the government in neighboring Iran decreed that all state universities must bar female students from their classrooms if they are not wearing traditional headscarves known as hijabs.

There was a time when measures denying women equal rights would hardly have raised an eyebrow in Central Asia – a region where women face persistent domestic violence, and a “high prevalence of restrictive gender norms” undermines female participation in education and economic activity, according to the World Bank.

Yet there are signs that those norms are cracking. Across the region, civil society groups devoted to gender equality are growing more numerous and vocal. And in one sign that the Taliban’s violent reversal of rights for girls and women in Afghanistan is resonating poorly, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan have opened their schools to Afghan girls under a scholarship program funded by the European Union.

“All Central Asian countries face similar problems in the field of gender equality,” said Madina Jarbussynova, a former Kazakh diplomat now serving as consultant to the U.N. on women’s issues. She told The Astana Times that “there is a need to deepen processes of removing obstacles to the full involvement of women in economic, social, and political spheres of development.”

Her country is setting the pace. In 2020, Kazakhstan adopted quotas requiring that at least 30% of any political party’s candidates for Parliament or local assemblies had to be female. The new rule had two motives: to boost the country’s credibility in international economic blocs and to ensure that more politicians understood the needs of women and youth.

Since then, the country has joined international campaigns against gender-based violence, eliminated an official list limiting women to certain jobs, opened entrepreneurship development centers for women across the country, and created the region’s first ministry for women’s economic development. More than 30% of Kazakhstan’s tech students are now female. So are 45% of small-business owners in the country. The country rose 15 places in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report.

Elsewhere in the region, Uzbekistan has created programs and scholarships to boost education for girls in science and engineering. Last month, Kyrgyzstan hosted an international conference including governments, civil society groups, and educators on harnessing digital data to promote gender equality in education and employment.

Initiatives like these reflect a region attempting to bridge its traditional social norms with a more modern recognition that women are essential to economic development – a process that one Uzbek teacher argued should result in “all the conditions for the full support of women ... to reveal their talents and aspirations.” That message may be getting harder for the Taliban to ignore.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Neighborly headwinds for the Taliban
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2023/0405/Neighborly-headwinds-for-the-Taliban
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe