In May, the Asian University for Women is expected to graduate its first class of 138 students, almost all of whom come from deprived backgrounds and rely on scholarships to pay for the $15,000 that room, board and school fees would cost.
In an IHT Female Factor Special Report, Bettina Wassener visited its campus in Chittagong, Bangladesh, a modest complex that has drawn young women from states as diverse as Afghanistan, China, the Palestinian territories and Indonesia. Most would not have had a chance at an English-language university-level education on a multicultural campus. Now, some of these young women are on exchanges as far-flung as Stanford University in the United States and the Institut d'Études Politiques in France.
The A.U.W.'s founder, Kamal Ahmad, is a native of Bangladesh who was educated in the United States; the grant to use the land is from Bangladesh itself. But the majority of the support comes from the West: Cherie Blair, the Bill & Mel inda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the IKEA Foundation and the U.S. State Department. The search for funds is still on as the A.U.W. slowly works toward building a larger campus.
The A.U.W. has inspired a somewhat different project in Malaysia. Kelly Wetherille talks to Barbara Hou, formerly of the Bangladeshi school, who now wants to build an Asian Women's Leadership University. The A.W.L.U., expected to open in 2015, aims to be an Asian version of the Seven Sisters, the grouping of elite U.S. liberal arts colleges for women. Her vision is for a school in a relatively affluent area with the majority of students paying full tuition, and about a quarter on scholarship.
While young women may be achieving equality in the classroom, there is another fight going in the upper echelons of academia, where women compete with men for research positions, professorships and executive posts.
As Liz Gooch reports, more than one-third of the higher educ ation institutions in the Philippines are headed by women. Thailand is also a surprising bright spot in this regard. But they are exceptions. In Asia, only 18 percent of university researchers are women, compared to 29 percent worldwide.
Fanny M. Cheung of the Chinese University of Hong Kong was blunt in her assessment of the social realities that might hold women back. She called the child-bearing years the “golden age†for academics. She also said that, in China in particular, women may hesitate before pursuing a Ph.D. because it might frighten off potential husbands.
“It takes a very confident man to be able to accept a wife who is in a so-called superior position because, by virtue of a higher degree, you will be considered more superior,†she said. “In Asia that is still a fairly strong barrier.â€
Didi Kirsten Tatlow attended a training session in Bangkok that turned the issue of women's rights on its head.
Instead of educating women, the session focused on educating men. The idea is that no amount of progress by women- and no number of well-meaning projects- would be enough if men themselves did not change. According to the United Nations' Partners in Prevention, more than half of men interviewed in Bangladesh said they had been violent against women. One in five men in Cambodia admitted to committing rape. The list of reasons - sexual entitlement, alcohol, fun, anger and punishment - were just as alarming as the statistics.
Somsouk Sananikone, an activist in Laos, said that it was important to education young men, in particular, before they engaged in these behaviors.
“We're looking at how every man may become violence, not just those who are already violent,†he said.
