Women in different global contexts

According to a 50-year-old Chinese saying 'women hold up half the sky'. Today women make up more than half of the world's population. References to the Chinese saying can be found, for example, in the publication by Nicholas Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn entitled Half the sky: Turning oppression into ­opportunity for women worldwide (2009), who declared the global struggle for women's equality 'the paramount moral challenge' of our era. It is obvious that although the issues of gender equality have been addressed in many documents (including international law documents), girls and women all over the world still suffer from violence, discrimination and limited access to education. Their situation varies depending on world regions, but it seems that there is no country that could be a model example of absolute and actual equality of women and men. Agnieszka Gromkowska-Melosik (2011, p. 11) writes that in contemporary society, analysis of the situation of women should focus on equality rather than inequality as it is the equality that is shaping women's everyday life, their social experience and identity more and more often. However, issues raised in this work concern various geographical regions and contexts, thus the notion of heterogenity of female sub-population, for example living conditions, as well as the social and cultural capital of women, is becoming more noticeable.