http://www.dosomething.org/tipsandtools/11-poignant-facts-about-women-around-world

In order:

  1. Claim: Women perform 66% of the world’s work, but receive only 11% of the world’s income, and own only 1% of the world’s land.
    Reality: Not a single portion of this claim is verifiably true, and two of the three are verifiably false.  Regardless of whether we use “property” (as the original) or “land” (inaccurate to the original claim, but slightly more believable), we can confirm that women own more than one percent of it worldwide, and women in the U.S. alone earn almost 10% of the world’s income.  The original source of these statistics?  Literally outright guesswork.
  2. Claim: Women make up 66% of the world’s illiterate adults.
    Reality: While this initially appears similar to the statistic (#8) debunked here, this version is actually accurate.  Nonetheless, for context, it’s important to note that gendered illiteracy is a regional problem, not a global one.  As discussed here and here, Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia alone account for 75% of all illiterate adults worldwide.  This means that it’s a much more localized problem than is implied, and one that has to be dealt with on a regional basis.
  3. Claim: Women head 83% of single-parent families. The number of families nurtured by women alone doubled from 1970 to 1995 (from 5.6 million to 12.2 million).
    Reality: While this may also be accurate, it is presented in a very misleading fashion.  First, while this is supposedly a list of “Facts about Women Around the World” this statistic clearly originates from the U.S. alone.  In the U.S, of the 12.2 million single parent families in 2012, slightly more than 80% were headed by single mothers.  (USCB)  This clearly does not present a world-wide view.  Second, this statistic entirely ignores the reasons for the disparity.  To wit, the disparity is a combination of discrimination against men in family law (leading to disproportionate female custody during divorce), and high levels of voluntary single motherhood.
  4. Claim: Women account for 55% of all college students, but even when women have equal years of education it does not translate into economic opportunities or political power.
    Reality: While the statistic is true, what follows is not.  First, the statistic confuses economic opportunities with economic results.  Second, it ignores disparities in choice of educational focus.  Third, it conflates political achievement with political power.  Fourth, this is also U.S.-specific, saying nothing about “women around the world” at all.

    Virtually all the evidence we have points to individual choice, not discrimination, as the root cause of the gender wage disparity.  Women have economic opportunity, but because most don’t take it few see economic results.  One factor is the choice of major: despite women being the majority of university students they primarily dominate unmarketable majors, whereas (despite no evidence of discrimination by universities) men dominate majors which normally lead to high economic outcomes.  The problem with “political power” is similar.  Women are the majority of citizens in most first-world nations, and an even greater majority of voters.  (This not withstanding, some studies suggest that women are more likely than men to be what’s termed “low-information voters.”)  In a democracy, that’s about the only kind of power that exists besides lobbying and various forms of vote-buying.  The clear intention of the quote is to speak to the lack of women in politics and infer from that some level of discrimination against women.  The reality is that women are just as likely to reach political office as men, when they run.  Most do not, mirroring the choices we see regarding economic factors.  Most importantly, in-group bias factors leave little reason to believe male-dominated government is evidence of government discrimination against women.  (A suggestion: compare the three most pro-women politicians to the thirty most pro-men politicians and see where you end up.)  Lack of political achievement is no evidence of lack of political power, something a casual look at modern politics should easily show.  

  5. Claim: There are six million more women than men in the world.
    Reality: This is just plain factually inaccurate.  The current world population disparity is much closer to ten times that, around 60 million.
  6. Claim: Two-thirds of the world’s children who receive less than four years of education are girls. Girls represent nearly 60% of the children not in school.
    Reality: As discussed in point 2, gender-based educational disparities are primarily regional, localized to the Middle-East and Africa.  While these numbers may or may not be accurate, they’re definitely somewhat misrepresented.
  7. Claim: Parents in countries such as China and India sometimes use sex determination tests to find out if their fetus is a girl. Of 8,000 fetuses aborted at a Bombay clinic, 7,999 were female.
    Reality: While it is true that sex-selective abortion occurs around the world, the numerical evidence presented is purely anecdotal.  This is used to inflate the perception, even though the sex disparity in abortion is far less dramatic.
  8. Claim: Wars today affect civilians most, since they are civil wars, guerrilla actions and ethnic disputes over territory or government. 3 out of 4 fatalities of war are women and children.
    Reality: This is wrong in about every possible way.  According to the Iraq Body Count and other figures virtually all military deaths were men, and women and children combined made up only 20% of civilian victims.  Note the weasel words here: women and children.  This is a common tactic used to inflate the numbers (as children are both male and female), but it’s also misogynist (painting women as children) and erasing/misandrist (men are “acceptable” victims).

    Of those 20%, roughly half were children, meaning that women made up at most about 10% of identifiable victims.  Among child deaths identifiable by sex, roughly two-thirds were male.  Out of 20,770 deaths identifiable by both sex and age, men and boys made up 18,498  For the record, this means that the overall civilian victim ratio is 89.1% men and boys to 10.9% women and girls, almost 10 to 1.  (The reason this doesn’t match the earlier 20% figure is that only 40% of child victims were known to be male or female, excluding a large portion from the gender calculation.)

    As one academic study concluded, “Our demographic analysis shows that Iraqi civilian men are the main civilian victims of lethal armed violence in this war, as in other wars, despite having the same protected civilian status as women and children civilians under laws of war.”  (Emphasis added.)

    Could it be that Iraq just has an aberrant gender distribution of fatalities?  Not likely.  One interesting finding of the IBC was that different forms of weaponry have distinctly different gender fatality distributions.  In particular, guns are the most discriminate (particularly in cases of abduction and torture, described as a “particularly appalling form of death”), leading to primarily male victims.  Air attacks and mortar fire were the most even-handed, killing close to equal numbers of men and women.  (Note that not a single weapon type was found to kill more women than men, with the highest ratio being 46% for air attacks.)

    The reason this is important to recognize is that mortar fire and air attacks are mostly limited to high-level conflicts like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they’re deployed primarily by countries such as the United States.  In fact, Coalition forces accounted for a disproportionate number of female deaths: 15.0% as compared to 4.1% of male deaths.  In comparison, Anti-Coalition forces accounted for 25.8% of male deaths and only 8.7% of female deaths.  Unknown perpetrators accounted for the remainder, killing men and women roughly equally.  Guerrilla actions, some civil wars and ethnic disputes, on the other hand, rarely involve the kinds of weaponry deployed by coalition forces in Iraq.  This makes higher levels of civilian female deaths in other conflicts highly unlikely.

    Women are not now and have never been the majority victims of war and conflict.

  9. Claim: Rape is consciously used as a tool of genocide and weapon of war. Tens of thousands of women and girls have been subjected to rape and other sexual violence since the crisis erupted in Darfur in 2003. There is no evidence of anyone being convicted in Darfur for these atrocities.
    Reality: Rape is indeed consciously used as a tool of genocide and weapon of war.  However, it is not a gendered one, and it’s known to affect both men and women.  The difference?  Female victims receive high levels of aid both internal (to the nation/conflict) and external (UN aid, etc.), whereas male victims receive little to none.  In some cases, agencies have even been threatened with defunding if they served too many male victims.  This combined refusal to acknowledge the existence of male conflict rape and refusal to provide aid to victims leads to consistent underreporting and world-wide ignorance of the problem.
  10. Claim: About 75% of the refugees and internally displaced in the world are women who have lost their families and their homes.
    Reality: While this is true, it might be worth considering the “why” of the matter.  See, the single biggest reason women are the majority of the displaced is that the men who would have been displaced are, well, dead.  The Rwandan genocide was a perfect example.  While the majority of the displaced were women and their children, it was only because their husbands and fathers had been murdered.  Which position would you rather be in?
  11. Claim: Gender-based violence kills one in three women across the world and is the biggest cause of injury and death to women worldwide, causing more deaths and disability among women aged 15 to 44 than cancer, malaria, traffic accident, and war.
    Reality: This doesn’t even contain the grain of truth most lies have.  The first half is addressed in point 9 here, and the second half is addressed here.  Neither of these claims have any basis in reality, something that should be obvious to anyone with a basic knowledge of statistics and some common sense.

 Some of these facts are accurate and some are total bull, but none of them are presented in a manner that is truly forthright.  Regional problems are represented as world issues, U.S. numbers are implied to be world figures, opportunity is confused with outcome and, well, the rest isn’t even close.

Try again.