Africa makes me sad sometimes

Newsweek had a fairly interesting article this week about women getting into government in Africa. I doubt I even need to say it, but I'm all for having women in government. I think that America has been horribly backwards with regards to this: we pride ourselves on being the best place in the world (like DisneyWorld, with nukes!), but we're so sadly deficient in some areas.

Anyway, I was reading the Newsweek article and it got me thinking, which is a dangerous thing for me to do sometimes. So I unleashed some of my super GoogleFu, and found the UN's Human Development Reports. Looking at their results sort of makes me want to live in Norway, or possibly Iceland, but that's not really what I was looking for. Of interest to me at the moment are the Gender Empowerment tables, such as women in parliament (or equivalant). Sort the table by percentage, and all the sudden, eclipsing Norway and Denmark, is Rwanda, which is ranked 159th overall for human development. The United States is way down towards the middle. Other unlikely nations whipping us in this category: Cuba, Mozambique, Guyana, Namibia, Uganda, Uzbekistan, Swaziland, and Eritrea, to name a few.

Granted, as I learned from Newsweek, one of the reasons why Rwanda (and presumably, a number of other nations) have so many women in high-ranking seats is because they're still recovering from massive civil wars and genocidal atrocities that killed huge percentages of their men. I am not in any way advocating mass murder of men in order to get more women into Congress here, because I feel comfortable stating that, without any exceptions, genocide is very bad.

But is that what it takes? If we want women to be allowed to be high-ranking government officials, if we want women to be seen as competant, to we have to have some stunning disaster first? Do we have to start from scratch, from an essentially decimated nation?

Sweden says no. So do Denmark, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands, Iceland, and Australia.

So: What's our problem? How on earth is it even possible, is it even concievable, that Rwanda (as in, nearly a million people murdered in a hundred days) is so very far ahead of us in something like female empowerment?

Now, at this point I could mention that Socrates said it was far better to suffer injustice than to inflict it, and I could mention that the US and pretty much everyone sort of looked at the genocide that happened in Rwanda and said, "Huh, genocide," and then moved on, and I could mention that there's been (amongst other problems) famine, civil unrest, and a touch of genocide going on in Sudan for years and we as a nation have yet to take any meaningful action.
But I won't mention any of that, because then, I'd really have to question how our Human Development ranking can be so high while we're such a backwards nation.