Conscious Choice

When Chuck and I traveled to Seattle last year for Memorial Day weekend, we picked up a copy of the Conscious Choice and then had it delivered to our house. Conscious Choice is “an enlightened urban lifestyle magazine focusing on social, green, health, food and spiritual consciousness.” We enjoy the magazine and it is available online, if you’re interested. Those that know me well, know that one of my biggest irritants is the inequities between women and men. It’s 2008 and there is still a glass ceiling (and what can really get me going is acknowledgement of the glass ceiling then paying lip service to attempts to change it). So, I digress. Here are some interesting facts presented in the article What Counts? in the January issue of Conscious Choice. Read the other facts on the website.

• 67 - Percentage of the world’s work that is done by women
• 10 - Percentage of the world’s income that is earned by women
• 1 - Percentage of the world’s property that is owned by women
• 76 Million - Number of girls in the world who have never received a single day of schooling
• 50 Percent reduced rate of HIV infection among young women in developing countries who attend at least six years of school
• 3 - Number of additional children unschooled women are likely to bear, as compared to their educated counterparts
• $35 Cost of sending an Afghani girl to school for one year
• $10 Billion - Amount it would cost each year to send all the world’s children to school by 2015 (less than the annual amount the world spends on ice cream)

So, why is this on my mind? The Copenhagen Post had a little blurb called Gender Gap. Danish women earn 3% more than their male counterparts in the public sector, according to the newly released 2008 Gender Gap Report from the World Economic Forum.

Sources: Potentia Foundation, International Women’s Health Coalition.

UPDATE: I could only find the 2007 Gender Gap Report, so perhaps it was a typo in the Copenhagen Post and the most recent report is 2007.