Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum Special Report Gender and Constitutional Issues The civil rights of citizenship are still more gender-complicated. As well as individual entitlements to identity and mobility, there is the issue of who may transmit their citizenship and its rights to their biological and/or adoptive children. The rights of women to transmit their citizenship have only recently, and still only in some countries, become equal to those of men. In 2001, we also accept that civil and political rights are perhaps less relevant to systematicallyimpoverished social categories – such as women and children – than are economic and social rights. These socio-economic rights are differentially distributed. They are taken for granted by men as the social category that controls property ownership, wealth and economic opportunity. Women comprise the vast majority of the world’s poor. They are widely quoted as doing 80% of the world’s manual labour but owning less than 10% of the world’s property. Women are, throughout the third world, poor, landless agricultural workers, but only infrequently the beneficiaries of ‘land reform’. The education of girls is still an important social issue in many countries. Gender discrimination in employment and sexual harassment in the workplace are generally female, not male, problems. Economic rights are critical to women. Finally, women are frequently the victims of ‘traditional cultures’ which deprive them of their human rights as specifically female individuals. ‘Cultural rights’ are often the rationale for masculine domination of domestic as well as national affairs. Even where women have the vote, ‘traditional culture’ often asserts that they should not stand for political office, for governance is the domain of men. Moreover, men’s political behaviour may be so aggressive and unattractive that women shun participation in such ‘dirty games’ of power. Domestic violence against women and children is also often legitimated by ‘culture’ and religion. ‘Cultural rights’ claimed by men are therefore also problematic for women. So it is high time we unpacked the gender dimensions of human rights. We need to look more carefully at the human rights specifically of women, at how far these are recognised and protected in our Constitution and law, at how well both the recognition of women’s human rights and these rights themselves work in practice. This report attempts such an analysis for Zimbabwe, and ends with the most up-to-date statement by Zimbabwean women of their demands, articulated in the Women’s Charter. 3