GLENN: There is a War on Women happening, but if you listen to those on the left. The biggest offender is, say it with me, the United States of America. The World Economic Forum released their list of the world's best countries for women, and the US was 45th. Let me give you a couple of highlights on the list. Rwanda was the fifth best nation on earth for women. Yeah, Rwanda. Forty places above the United States.
Rwanda.
One of the criteria used to arrive at that conclusion is the percentage of women in the Rwandan legislature. According to WEF, 64 percent of the seats in the Rwandan parliament are occupied by women. Just a side note, after the Rwandan genocide, 70 percent of their population was women. So it seems to go to reason that it would -- anyway, one of the reasons the US is listed as low as it is, is the ever present income inequality argument.
As we have discussed over and over, including by the liberal newspaper, the Washington Post, there are many extenuating factors that go into why overall men earn more money than women. To name a few: Different professional choices, maternity leave, length of time in the job market, and a whole lot more. But boil down, when you compare men and women with similar education levels, similar job experience, length of time in a particular job, and skill levels -- in other words, when comparing apples to apples in America, men and women make virtually the same amount of money. In fact, in some industries, when those factors are considered, women's actual average income is slightly more than men.
In 2010, TIME Magazine reported that there was 147 of the 150 biggest cities in the country, and the median full-time salaries of young single women were higher than their male peers, by 8 percent.
Another criteria used to rate the United States lower than you might think it should be in the quality of life for women is the participation for women in the job force because it's stagnant. Is there a definitive explanation for that?
No. Not that I can think of. But could one reason that many women are choosing to stay home to raise their children full-time? Of course. Since when are women who raise children second-class citizens? Since when do we say our quality of life is because everyone in the family works?
Is the World Economic Forum going to inform America's children that they're just not important enough to warrant a parent staying in the home to raise them, or will they inform our next generation that they don't deserve the time and attention of their own parents? Or maybe they should just admit, some people choose to stay home with their kids, and it's not a bad choice.
Rarely, if ever, is actual oppression and violence against women even mentioned, such as when it exists under Sharia law. Even in the supposedly westernized tolerant Dubai, in the UAE, the situation for women can be extremely hazardous. Charlotte Adams, she was visiting Dubai from London. She greeted a male friend in the bar in Dubai with a kiss on the cheek to say hello. Well, when she left the bar, the Dubai police stopped her.
VOICE: He was like, were you kissing him? And I was like, no. And he's like, did you kiss him? And I was like, well, we would have kissed on the cheek to say hi. But apparently, as soon as I said we kissed on the cheek, that was it. It was like kissing on the cheek is illegal.
VOICE: Charlotte spent 23 days behind bars before being deported.
GLENN: Charlotte actually got off easy. The 27-year-old Australian Alicia Gali went to Dubai to manage a hotel and spa. She had a room in the hotel she managed. And one night, her room became flooded. It turned out later that someone had intentionally stuffed a T-shirt in the plumbing to cause the overflow.
While the workers if I could her room, she waited in the bar. A coworker came by, dropped some ice cubes in her drink. The next thing she remembers is waking up naked and badly bruised with four broken ribs. She had been raped by three men.
Alicia went to the hospital for treatment and to alert the police.
VOICE: What Alicia didn't know is that being raped was essentially the same as having sex outside of marriage, where the sex is consensual, and that she would be charged with the same offense as those who had assaulted and raped her.
GLENN: Alicia was quickly learning firsthand about the real War on Women. From an Australian documentary on the case...
VOICE: So a woman can only prove that she has been raped if there are four adult Muslim men watching the rape.
VOICE: You were prepared to say that the sex was non-consensual.
VOICE: Alicia Gali spent eight months in that Dubai prison before being released during a Muslim holiday celebration.
In 2008, a 13-year-old Somali girl named Aisha Duhulow reported to authorities that she had been gang raped. Instead of receiving justice, she was stoned to death by 50 men.
Sharia courts in Pakistan have punished thousands of raped women who dare accuse their attacker with imprisonment.
In Bangladesh, female victims are flogged, beaten, and imprisoned after being raped.
In Afghanistan, it's possible that a daughter who had been raped will be honor killed by her parents.
In 2014, the international women's group intervened on behalf of a 10-year-old girl who had been raped by her mullah in a mosque.
Their job? To persuade her family not to kill her. Good news: So far the family has not.
But in Nigeria, 200 schoolgirls were kidnapped out of their school and sold into sexy slavery because their extremist captors believed they had a right to do it since the girls were being educated. Hashtags popped up for the girls here in America, but nothing was really accomplished for the girls on their behalf. So there is a War on Women. Severe human rights violations, directed against women all over the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and other parts of the world, and virtually no one seems to focus on it.
Meanwhile, in the United States, the so-called war often involves whether or not free birth control devices are available on every street corner.
VOICE: One told us on how embarrassed and just powerless she felt, when she was standing at the pharmacy counter and learned for the first time the contraception was not covered on her insurance. And she had to turn and walk away because she couldn't afford that prescription. Women like her have no choice, but to go without contraception. Just last week, a married female student told me that she had to stop using contraception because she and her husband just couldn't fit it into their budget anymore.
GLENN: Perspective should be the word of the year. Perspective.
It would be helpful, at least when we have to answer the question, is life perfect for women? Of course not. Not here or anywhere else. It's not perfect for men either. But it might be helpful to take a breath and look around from time to time to see if you were looking to America from the outside, how perfect a woman's life may look to them. We'll seek to gain some of that perspective on the next episode.
