President Mary McAleese has described as “particularly brutal” and “utterly appalling” the consequences for women of the global economic downturn.
Delivering the commencement address at Mount Holyoke, in Massachusetts, one of the leading liberal arts colleges for women in the United States, Mrs McAleese said a return to poverty threatened many of the advances women have made.
“Women are already paid less, work more often in the informal economy with fewer rights, own businesses dependent on microfinance loans many of which will dry up, and rely on now dwindling remittances to keep home budgets going. And it is girls that often get pulled out of school first when family finances are reduced,” she said.
“Two-thirds of the illiterate people in the world are women. That equates directly to disempowerment. It is the first, founding inequality on which wider restrictions on female achievement and contribution are based.”
The President noted that, despite the enormous possibilities that have opened up for women in the developed world, political life remains overwhelmingly a male preserve. Women were also underrepresented at the senior levels of business and their disempowerment had profound implications even for their personal safety.
“Twice as many men as women belong to political parties. In my own country, only 13 per cent of the people in our parliament are women,” she said.
“A tiny fraction of senior management in the private sector worldwide are women. Even when education is fought for and achieved, the ability to use it freely is often anything but easy - one third of African women with a third-level education emigrate, markedly higher than for men. And, of course, down to the very level of physical safety, in fewer than one in ten cases of sexual violence worldwide is the perpetrator charged.”
Mrs McAleese was speaking at the start of a six-day visit to Massachusetts focused on economic issues and the Irish-American community. Springfield, where the visit began, is the home district of Democratic congressman Richard Neal, chairman of the congressional Friends of Ireland and a leading American supporter of the Northern peace process.
Mr Neal, who has represented the district in Congress for 21 years, was previously mayor of Springfield, a city that saw large-scale immigration from Ireland over the last two centuries, particularly from Kerry.
Following today's commencement ceremony at Mount Holyoke in nearby South Hadley, where Mrs McAleese was conferred with an honorary law doctorate, she visited the Irish Cultural Centre at Chicopee. There, she met members of the Carney family, who emigrated to Springfield from the Blasket Islands in 1953.
Tomorrow, she will lay a wreath at a Celtic Cross in Worcester to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the Irish and will visit Worcester Irish Cultural Heritage Centre before travelling to Boston.
She will also visit Worcester Irish Cultural Heritage Centre before meeting Mayor Thomas Menino and Governor of Massachusetts Deval Patrick in Boston.
On Thursday, the President will visit the John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum outside Boston.
Mrs McAleese will also attend events hosted by Tourism Ireland, Enterprise Ireland and the America Ireland Fund during her trip.
In December, the President visited California, Oregon and Arizona during a six-day visit to the US.
She returns to Ireland on Friday.
