27 Sept: Inequality continued

I'll confess to finding Cohen's article from The Quality of Life opaque, but I'm familiar enough with that problem in the reading I try to do that I have some strategies for coping with it. The first one I tried, in an effort to get at what the issues were that I should be attending to, was to do a google search for 'sen and rawls' and sort through the results for things that seemed to be addressing the same realm in language I could cope with. I found some and printed them out and read through them, basically looking for whither these topics have gone since the Cohen article. For me that resulted in a focused question, one that I started out being not sure if Sen addresses, but that we should address, and that's gender inequality.
So my BIG question, to which I'd like to find some answers, is: what's the geography of gender inequality? What order of problem is this for the world, and for Stewards to consider? Perhaps it's a long way from the philosophical questions of welfare inequality that Rawls took on 30 years ago, but it's right up there with the big problems of the 21st century ...and, indeed, it's one that has emerged as an Issue since the early 1970s. It's not primarily economic, though there are surely economic measures (salary differentials and so on). And surely there's more I should know about this, or be able to find out. So let's use it as an example in information-finding.
As a librarian, my first instinct is to consider ?how shall we set about finding out about? , knowing that the answer won't be simple and one-stop. Basic background data at the national level is easy enough to find, via Annie and the Web. Annie is certainly helpful, returning 110+ hits for a keyword search for 'equality and women', and yielding some useful-looking Subject Headings (Sex role -- Developing countries, Women in development -- Developing countries, Women's rights, Women -- Social conditions ...). Much more could be done in that realm. And the Web is of course a treasure trove: a useful summary site would seem to be The World's Women 2000: Trends and Statistics from the UN Statistics Division. Another is ILO Gender Web Site. Yet another UN site is Counting the cost of gender inequality (UNFPA), and we have the Human Development Report data that we can use to make maps of various indicators at the national level.

And more hunting turns up GENDER INEQUALITY IN HUMAN DEVELOPMENT: THEORIES AND MEASUREMENT by Sudhir Anand and Amartya Sen... (Occasional Paper 19 of Human Development Report), here's a Cornell news report: An alarming trend in gender inequality is Sen's Olin lecture topic (April 2001)

...and I have a nice example of gender issues and geography in Reproductive behavior in time and space (G. William Skinner) and some Chinese data on sex ratios... (see Followup on "One Child, Many Exceptions" for part of the picture)

Other Sen/Rawls things I found: