Female empowerment in the western world

The difficulty in western society focuses on exposing the covert camouflaged discrimination due to its being a world that defines itself as 'enlightened', and therefore gave birth to new and sophisticated types of discrimination. The absence of empowerment of women in this society does not emanate from the apparent absence of equality (declarative equality or legislative equality) but from the absence of equality, that exists and is possible in alternative indirect ways.

Raising awareness of this situation is harder due to the sophistication of the discrimination, but the result is identical as far as internalizing the

96 Based on Maslow's Needs Theory

97 The social and egoistical needs in Maslow's pyramid or the belonging and growth needs as described by Alderfer (1969).

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situation by women is concerned, of the existence of barriers and perpetuating and preserving socialization.

In the 1970s, the theories that defined a developed and modern society were the infrastructure of creating a feminist liberal organization under the title Women in Development (WID) ( UN, 2000; Nishimoto, 2001).

This approach supported the integration of women in the existing

frameworks, based on the belief that the more women who integrate will create an impact that will lead to change. Such integration will be

possible through adapting the institutions to women. The first stage in change was therefore to demand recognition of their 'unique needs'. The institutional organization included establishing mechanisms and

institutions purely on the expertise in understanding women's needs at the local and the international levels – opening offices dealing with the status of women, instruction programs for the staff in institutions and

organizations, declaratory activities through formulating treaties and contracts of commitment, and consultancy to companies and institutions regarding taking initiatives and developing policy that advances and integrates women. This activity focused attention to the fact that western society, with its institutions, systematically ignores women's experiences in all areas of life, and this must therefore be changed through formal and institutional means. The danger in this approach lies in the fact that it is reasonable to assume that the male interests will take over in any case, an assumption proven over the years. The fact that women found it difficult to penetrate and to alter the male institution is clearer now than ever, and women who advanced within the existing frameworks are perceived as adopting male behavior. Few women hold influential positions and the need for affirmative action program, amongst other things in legislation, indicates more than anything else that women did not integrate and did not create transformative change as anticipated.

Furthermore, the formal institutions involved in the issue of the status of women enjoy an attitude that Maor (2001) terms "the symbolic policy approach" meaning:

1. Confused phraseology of objectives, goals and frameworks of action;

2. The absence of the delegation of authority and the allocation of resources (budgets) to apply the reform - policy

3. Intensive distribution of symbols, such as detailing the striving for change and detailed presentation of the vision in order to cover the ambiguity of the policy declaration and the shortage of resources for its implementation (Maor, 2001).

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Those involved in the domain encountered and suffered from bureaucracy and encumbrances found themselves blocked exactly like the women in whose name and for whom they were supposed to work.⁹⁸ The integration process is proven to be a long tiring, frustrating and very costly process.

Since the 1980s extensive grassroots activity has been observed and burst into the public awareness when the local women's voluntary organizations offered a different approach. These organizations were based on the radical feminist approach that assumed that all the existing organizations are patriarchal, and therefore are affected by inequality towards women from their initiation and their organizational structure. Their approach is known as Women and Development (WAD) (Parpart 1989; Rathgeber, 1990).

This approach espoused the establishment of alternative institutions for women only, developing other administrative approaches, based on female needs. These single-gender, non-formal organizations endangered themselves by marginalizing their activities due to the absence of

budgets, thereby affecting the goals of significant (transformative) change they set themselves (UN, 2000). These difficulties created a situation in which, again, no alternative to the existing one was generated of a broad and influential scope, and thus no hoped for change occurred. This possibility too is a long, tiring and frustrating process that suffers from ups and downs and even disappointments. The organizations' activities increased female awareness and the social awareness about women.

Both approaches still exist alongside each other without any final determination between them.

The gender equality approach developed later, born in the wake of criticism of the two previous approaches as narrow and separatist since they were intended only for women (Scott, 1989). The term 'gender' includes men and women as populations that should be considered, but in the beginning, and even today, the word has become a synonym for women, and thus 'women's studies' became 'gender studies'. The term sounds neutral and therefore less loaded, so that politically it is easier to handle despite some claiming that it again is used to defer or to divert interest from the inferior positioning of women.

Following the introduction of the term 'gender equality' the attitude today is towards 'gender and development', an approach adopted by the UN

98 Describes exactly the situation of advisors on the status of women and of institutions established to represent the subject of women in the State of Israel

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prior to the 1995 Beijing Conference (UNESCO, 2002). In reality there is a type of combination of the institutional and the non-institutional approaches with general confusion between the terms.