Women in Comparative Societies

Course Project

Each of you will choose a country who’s Gender Regime you will research. The countries to choose from are:  Sweden, France, Russia, Poland, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Mexico, Brazil, China, India, Thailand, the Philippines, Rwanda, Zambia or South Africa.

As we shall learn throughout the course, a gender regime consists of the gender repercussions of each region’s dominant religious beliefs, family life, and its economic and political systems. Click here to see the Gender Regime Table a tabular description of the US Gender Regime and the labels and descriptions of other political-economic regime types. 

Note that the table begins with descriptions of several different types of political and economic regimes such as Liberal-Individualist, Social Democratic and Marxist-Leninist, etc.  It is your task to decide what kind of political-economic regime exists in your country and to develop the descriptions you will put in the columns across from that regime type.  You will include your version of the Gender Regime Table in the Power Point Presentation you will create during the last week of the course.

Power Point Presentation

You will each create a Power Point Presentation depicting the Gender Regime of your country. There is no fixed requirement in terms of length, but 15-20 slides is a good goal.

Here’s a list of the bases you should be sure to cover:

1. The predominant religions in your country and how it's beliefs and authority structures have shaped the status of women.

2. A description of family life and women's power/status within the family.

3. A description of and statistics on women's participation in the economy.

4. A description of and statistics on women's participation in politics. It is appropriate to highlight significant women politicians, current or former.

5. At least one table with data for your country comparing it to others in its region and to the regional averages for other regions.

6. A section naming and describing the gender regime in your region, i.e, the Gender Regime Table.

7. A section recommending an action for us to take to work for gender justice in the region. 

Remember that since you are not going to orally present your work, your slides have to have all the information you want to convey to your “audience.”

Aim to make your presentation both informative AND visually interesting. Use photos, graphs, maps, etc.

You will post your presentation to the Class Discussion Board Forum labeled “Presentations.”

Then, you will write a 5-page summary of your country’s Gender Regime which you will post to the Gender Regime Discussion Board. Please include the Gender Regime Table for your country as the last page of your paper.

Finally, you will read and comment on at least one presentation created by your classmates (by Friday, week 6, at noon). A good comment should include information gleaned from the class, i.e., referring to analytical concepts and measures we have become familiar with and referencing authors we have read in the class.

Paper and Citation Format

The paper should be double-spaced, with 1-inch margins all the way around. Your name, my name, the name of the course, and the date should be single-spaced, in the upper left hand corner of the first page. You must include a Works Cited page.

Click here for citation format; this site is useful for electronic citations. NOT CITING OR UNDER CITING WILL RESULT IN A SIGNIFICANT REDUCTION IN YOUR GRADE.

Data and Other Sources

To develop your description of your country’s Gender Regime, you must use data found in the Appendix of Women Across Cultures and UNIFEM's Progress of the World's Women to develop averages for the geographical region (defined below) your country is in, and to compare your country to the regional averages to other regions.

You must search the databases available through Foley Library’s Website for articles from journals and popular media, searching a large research university library for books to be obtained via interlibrary loan (start early!!).

Some suggested links for your research are:
UNIFEM
http://www.unifem.undp.org/
CIA Worldfactbook
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html
Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing
http://www.wiego.org/
National Council for Research on Women
http://www.ncrw.org/

Gender Regime Table

To complete the Gender Regime Table for your country, you need to:

1) decide which of the political and economic system types best describes your country; use the descriptions listed in the Ideals and Economy columns as your guide.
2) describe how these ideals are manifested in public policies that disproportionately affect women;
3) name the dominant religion(s) of your country;
4) describe how religious ideals shape your country’s gender regime;
5) describe women’s participation in the economy in your country;
6) describe women’s participation in politics in your country.

All of this information will be put into the Gender Regime Table and posted to the Discussion Board by.

The Regions Use the other countries listed after the name of each region to develop regional averages. If data is missing for one or more of the countries listed on a particular indicator, simply omit it from the regional average.

Western Europe (UK, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden)
Post-Communist Europe (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, the Russian Federation, Bulgaria, Romania);
Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Honduras, El Salvador, Chile, Colombia, Peru);
South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan);
East Asia (China, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, N Korea, S Korea);
Pacific Island  (Philippines, Indonesia, East Timor, Papua New Guinea, Guam);
The Middle East/North Africa (Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iran);
Sub-Saharan Africa (Senegal, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Ghana, Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia).