Gender inequality, AIDS focus of Duvvury lecture
While Rice plans to raise over $100 million over the next decade to help fight AIDS and support world health, students from a variety of majors and concentrations congregated at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy last Friday to hear Nata Duvvury (Jones ‘73), director of Gender, Violence and Rights at the International Center for Research on Women, speak about the effects of gender inequality as it relates to HIV/AIDS, women’s ownership of property and gender-based violence.
Duvvury’s topic on women’s property ownership was the first in the lecture series, “Gender, Health and Human Well Being”.
Drawing from her extensive research in India, South Africa and Uganda, Duvvury started off by explaining that gender violence occurs across cultures and is not isolated to certain parts of the world.
Disparities between the rights of men and women in certain cultures hinder women’s development and sustainability. Duvvury said she believes the key to promoting gender equality is through women’s property ownership. She said house ownership in the woman’s name is an important foundation for female empowerment. All of these directly affect a woman’s freedom to make decisions about her own well-being, she said.
“With assets you increase household power, food availability, security and income,” Duvvury said.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the inheritance rights of women are not well-recognized, and the fluid property rights and cultural allocation suggests that women have “user rights” to the land they work on
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