Editorial

On the World Statistics Day 2010, the UN released Comprehensive Statistics on World’s Women documenting progress for women in key areas which include: population and families, health, education, work, power and decision-making, violence against women, environment and poverty. The report highlights that there are about 57 million more men than women in the world and while Europe has many more women than men, countries like India, Pakistan, China and Bangladesh have a ‘shortage of women”.  It also highlights among other important issues, the case of vulnerable employment which is prevalent in Africa and Asia, especially among women. It is again in these countries that the existing laws limit women’s access to land and other properties. With an indication of the existing inequalities among the population in the countries mentioned, this report draws our attention to the striking realities. We need to focus our attention and work towards reducing such imbalance.

It is a small endeavor to bring to our readers some of the important debates and research papers which address the perspective of women in work. Accordingly, this newsletter includes a short summary of “Aid In Support of Gender Equality And Women’s Empowerment, 2010”. There is an article by Nitya Nanda on “EU-India FTA: Possible Gender Implications and a short paper by Ria Sinha on The Nexus between Trade Liberalization and Gender in India.

We hope it will provide some interesting reading.