Jewish Life Digital Edition November 2014 | Page 39

group of girls sharing a sisterhood, a union
with a common purpose.
Israeli women also have brains – in
abundance. In the year 2000, Israel created
the Council for the Advancement of Women
in Science and Technology to enable
government to help advance women in
these fields. Again, according to statistics,
in the year 2003, women constituted only
25% of all graduates completing degrees in
the hard sciences; 24% of senior academic
staff in the country’s higher-education
sector; and 29% of those working in the
technology industry. That was just the
beginning, because since then, their
numbers have escalated proportionate to
the achievements attributed to them. One
example – the prime example, with many
dogging her footsteps and following her
path – is that of Ada Yonath, who, as
director of the Helen and Milton A
Kimmelman Centre for Biomolexular
Structure and Assembly at the Weizmann
Institute of Science, received the Nobel
Prize in Chemistry, the first Israeli woman
out of 10 Israeli Nobel laureates to win the
Nobel Prize, the first Middle East woman
ever to win a Nobel prize in the sciences,
and the first woman in 45 years to win the
Chemistry prize.
Further research has shown that by 2010,
the majority of students studying for an
Israeli university degree in science were
women – this, despite the fact that much
work has still to be done to achieve gender
equity in the professional scientific fields.
And yet – and yet – despite Israel’s
admirable Declaration of Independence
declaring that “The State of Israel (…) will
ensure complete equality of social and
political rights to all its inhabitants
irrespective of religion, race or sex”, and
despite Israeli law specifically prohibiting
discrimination based on gender in
employment and wages, and providing for
class action suits when necessary, even more
statistics show that Israeli women have been
consistently under-represented in virtually

all areas of public life; and not only underrepresented but underpaid as well.
In general – excluding the few who have
broken through the glass ceilings in their
work lives – Israeli women earn less, are less
respected and, certainly in government, are
far less influential than their male colleagues.
Examine the figures. Only four of the 22
ministers in the country’s current government
are women; only two women are deputy
ministers; and the opposition Labour party is
no longer headed by a woman. Seven of
Israel’s 33 governments since independence
have had no women MKs. The South African
parliament, on the other hand, has a 40%
representation of female MPs; and by party
representation, 47% of the ANC’s seats are
filled by women, 28% of the DA and 32% of
the EFF. South Africa is on a par with the
Scandinavian countries – Israel, to its shame,
is much further down the list.
But then, of course, Israel was the third
country in the world ever to have a female
leader: Golda Meir was prime minister from
1969 to 1974. Before the epithet was
applied to Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir
was called the ‘Iron Lady’ of Israeli politics;
feisty, strong-willed and straight-talking, a
perfect icon heralding the fledgling
international feminist movement.
Israel’s judiciary also seems weighted too
much in favour of men. Dorit Beinisch
served as the first woman state attorney of
Israel from 1989 to 1995, and was succeeded
in this position by the second woman state
attorney, Edna Arbel, who served from 1996
to 2004. In 2006, Beinisch, who had served
in the Isra