Equal Rights for Women? Survey Says: Yes, but . . .

Found this disturbing article in the New York Times... pretty interesting read about a Pew poll where most people say they support equal rights for men and owmen, but that men should ger preference when jobs are scarce or in education or even in the right to work outside the home - not very equal, is it? Pulled the main pieces here:

• "In nations where equal rights are already mandated, women seem stymied by a lack of real progress, the poll found."
• "One hundred percent of French women and 99 percent of French men backed the idea of equal rights. Yet 75 percent also said that men there had a better life, by far the highest percentage in any of the countries in which polling took place."
• "Nigeria, in fact, was the only surveyed country where more than half (54 percent) said women should not have equal rights; 45 percent of respondents favored equal rights."
• "Showing how widely accepted the notion of equality has become, even more men than women in Britain and Japan supported equal rights. (Scandinavian countries, which often score highest on gender equality, were not part of the survey.)"
• "Only in three countries did a majority of those surveyed say that women and men have achieved a comparable quality of life: Mexico (56 percent), Indonesia (55 percent) and Russia (52 percent)."
• "Only in South Korea (49 percent) and Japan (47 percent) did more people say women are better off than say men are, or that they are the same. It may be that men there “resent being married to their company, and also that there are fewer expectations of women,” Professor True said. “But that’s not equality.”"
• "Half or more of those asked in India, Pakistan and Egypt say a university education is more important for a boy; in China, Japan, Jordan, Poland and Nigeria, that number was at least one-third."
• "Likewise, a strong core in several countries said men had more right to a job than women. More than 50 percent in 10 of the 22 countries said that when jobs are scarce, they should go to men."

NOTE: The article noted that it wasnt just people developing nations that felt this way, but also citizens of wealthy ones.

There's a lot of commentary about these issues in the news and on this blog, but it's interesting to see some statistics about what people believe on the surface (Q: equal rights for women and men?) versus what that means in practice.