The United Nations Decade for Women (1975-85) was an unprecedented international effort to collect all available evidence on the position of women. This book assembles those findings, augmented by research carried out by Oxford University's Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women. But revealing as the facts are, statistics alone can not provide a deeper understanding of women's everyday experiences. Thus the book includes a series of personal reports by women about women. Ten writers--five from poor countries, five from rich countries--among them, Marilyn French, Germaine Greer, and Maya Angelou--visited distant lands and brought back rich insights into women's lives around the world. The Third World women reported on industrialized nations and vice versa and the result is a fascinating set of cross-cultural viewpoints. For example, Buchi Emecheta of Nigeria traveled to the United States to investigate the impact of the education boom on sex roles, while Britain's Jilly Tweedy met the first generation of literate women in Indonesia.The final section of the book contains a comprehensive country-by-country listing of major statistics on women around the world, thus making the book a vital source and reference on the subject.Authoritative both in its research and in the range of its contributors, Women: A World Report will long stand as the difinitive work on the state of the world's women.This book was sponsored and compiled by New Internationalist, a cooperative specializing in social justice and world development issues. In addition to publishing its own magazine, it collaborates with the UN and other organizations to produce a wide range of press, television, and educational materials.