This morning I woke up fairly early after a glorious eight and a half hours sleep. I got up, threw some clothes on, made lunch (scallops with aubergines and broccoli), made breakfast (eggs and bacon and tomatoes and cucumber) and sat down to read the paper (should it be called the paper if it's online?).
I was in luck. The Guardian had combined two of my favourite things: an interactive infographic and women's rights. Now, the infographic wasn't great. The circular way it is arranged, and the fact that it is arranged by population of the countries, which I don't really understand the reasons for unless it's trying to reflect how many women are affected by legislation, made it difficult to read. The fact that it was separated by different parts of the world made it difficult to compare some of the countries I would have liked to compare. But in any case, cool infographic.
I started playing around with it and reading it. I wanted to check out how European countries compare, so I clicked on the first place I read "Europe" without really reading. I ended up in "Eastern Europe and Central Asia". To my surprise, Albania and Turkey were very colourful (the infographic is colour coded, the brighter the colours the more laws the country has in that area). More than that: every single "Eastern Europe and Central Asia" country has completely liberal abortion laws. If you want an abortion, you can get it. I was not surprised at all by this in the case of countries that had been under communism, in fact, I expected it of many of them (although the fact that Romania had fully liberal abortion laws was slightly unexpected, maybe because of my bias due to "4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days", a fantastic film about abortion during the Ceausescu regime, a communist regime that restricted abortion severely in order to increase nativity rates). What was more surprising is that, when it comes to abortion, Turkey has less restrictive laws than the UK, Finland or Iceland. In fact, according to the infographic, Great Britain's Constitution was crap regarding gender laws. And so I started to see the truth of the infographic. Because of course, the UK doesn't have a written Constitution. Plus, the UK does have an equality law.
The infographic is a cool tool. It's quite nice to summarise data in an attractive colourful way. But it also lies. A lot. For example, regarding abortion, the infographic maintains that Iceland and Finland have more restrictive laws than Turkey or Albania. The only reason for this is that Iceland and Finland don't offer abortion on demand. I am not going to pretend to know the ins and outs of Icelandic or Finnish (or any other country's) abortion laws. However, I know that the English, Welsh and Scottish interpretation of the English, Welsh and Scottish (the situation in Northern Ireland is somewhat different) abortion law (which says that abortion may be performed if the continuation of the pregnancy poses a greater risk for the mother than the interruption of said pregnancy) is that any pregnancy carried to term is more risky than a termination, effectively making it so that as long as you find the right doctors (and this is not too difficult) having an abortion in the UK is perfectly feasible even though abortion on demand as such is not available.
Another lie of the infographic becomes apparent when one takes a look at the "Constitution"section for each country. For one thing, it doesn't take into account that some countries (the UK being the first I noticed) don't have a written Constitution, and therefore talking about the Constitution is somewhat irrelevant. For another it doesn't take into account that other countries (such as the US) consider that an article including "equal rights" makes the need for an article on non-discrimination obsolete. Of course, this might is not always true, but it is in many interpretations of the US Constitution.
The other thing that sort of bothered me about the infographic was redundancy. For example, Great Britain doesn't have laws regarding sexual abuse in domestic violence. This is because Great Britain has laws regarding sexual abuse independent of domestic violence. In a similar way, I find that laws regarding sexual harassment, if they are good enough, preclude the need for laws regarding sexual harassment at work, or in school, or in public spaces, etc. etc.
Don't get me wrong. I loved the infographic. It kept me entertained for a while and gave me material for a blogpost. It just reminded me of how flawed statistics and data presentation can be. It also reminded me how generalisations make feminism few favours: some people reading this post may conclude that I am arguing that women's rights are advanced and equal in many countries. They are not. There is still a lot to do for women's rights. For this reason, it is important that when we talk about them we are absolutely clear, know exactly what is a law, what is an interpretation and what is meaningless. It is also important to understand the context of laws. If a law is present in a country where laws are routinely broken by the governing body, then there is no point in evaluating the law. If a law is present in a country in war, where laws are continuously broken, saying that that country has more freedom than another country with a slightly more restrictive law is stupid.
I like reading the paper in the mornings. It wakes me up, and it usually gets me thinking. And once in a while, it reminds me not to believe everything I read in the newspaper.
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