Author Description

Many difficulties have been encountered by researchers attempting to assess women's status in contemporary societies. One major obstacle has to do with the problems encountered in developing indices of status that can be used as objective measures of women's position. Due to such obstacles, many, if not most, studies of women's status have concentrated on qualitative analyses of single cultures or culture areas, making comparisons across societies unsystematic and, therefore, of limited applicability. Yet it is just such systematic studies that are required if the conditions per- petuating women's status around the world are to be identified and changed. This work presents a first attempt to develop measures of woemen's status, using existing statistics, that are applicable across nations and make possible comparisons in time and space. This vilume reviews the literature on the determinants of women's status in con- temporary societies, analyzes the range of variation in women's position in the public sector, provides quantitative measures of women's status in the political, economic, edicational, and family spheres, and identifies factors important in explaining and predicting women's position on a world wide scale.