Correlation between Women and a Country's Prosperity
One of my close friends – Vish – has written this based on an earlier post on drishtikone. I think it is very informative and analyzes our poverty in context of our age old wisdom in the Vedas.
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Desh posted a story about killing female babies which prompted me to write this.
If we look at all the countries of the world (check out www.cia.gov/factbook), you’ll see that in all the countries of the world where women/females are second class citizens – maltreated, kept from education and other opportunities – or just plainly not wanted, as shown by female infanticide counts, the country turns out to be poor. And in countries where female to male ratios are decently higher there is more prosperity. These two observations have NO EXCEPTIONS. IMHO, this also largely explains why the Muslim countries as a whole are much poorer and backward than others, of course not counting countries like Saudi Arabia who are sitting on gushers of oil. Though, even in SaudiA, the general education of the people is dismal – ever heard of any smart Saudis inside or outside of Saudi Arabia in the field of education/sciences in the last 70 years (since they became rich)?
So how does one explain this correlation? The Vedas say that the mother (a woman) is the first and greatest teacher of a human being. So when the teacher is uneducated/poorly-educated/suppressed, how can the students – the offsprings – be smart? They will start life on the wrong foot and always find it hard to know right from wrong!
Women are also acclaimed in the Vedas (which BTW most Hindus don’t heed either) to have all the distinguishing human characteristics in greater measure than men on average; these are : Dedication, Hard work, Honesty (e.g. women are a tiny minority of convicts), Integrity (ask the Grameen Bank founder), Faith in God, Justice and Brains (check out the average scores of girls versus boys in Indian High School graduation tests for the last 10 years; women now outnumber men 6:4 in all US college enrollment). So if one were to heed the Vedas, any country were women are not empowered is destined for regression. And where they are suppressed, poverty and misery will come naturally. And this is what has been borne out by the facts!
Female infanticide is not only cruel, it is the stupidest thing to do for a society’s well being