Something's Missing From Pope Francis' 'Radical' Vision of Equality: Women

Pope Francis this week embarked on a seven-day "homecoming" tour of Latin America on his unstoppable quest to defend the planet and the poor.

The continent--the most unequal region in the world, and the Argentine pontiff's home turf--will likely provide fertile ground for more of his legendary sermons on poverty and inequality. After addressing a crowd of a million in Guayaquil, Ecuador, on Monday, Francis is scheduled to attend a meeting of grass-roots political activists and visit one of the continent's largest prisons, in Bolivia, as well as a slum and a children's hospital in Paraguay.

While he advocates for South America's impoverished and disenfranchised, its prisoners, its indigenous peoples and its children, one group is unlikely to feature in Francis' apparently radical agenda: its women.

Despite his efforts to champion his constituency--the world's poor, of which the vast majority are women--the pope tends to overlook the feminized nature of poverty and inequality.

Like the rest of the world, including the Vatican, Latin America is built on gender inequality. Important progress has been made in the region over recent decades, and the percentage of its overall population living in poverty had decreased significantly. But the feminization of poverty (an increase in the levels of poverty among women or female-headed households relative to the levels of men or male-headed households) increased from 109 percent in 1994 to almost 117 percent in 2013, according to the United Nations.

Women's labor participation in the region remains more than a quarter less than that of men, at 52.9 percent, compared with 79.6 percent, as recorded in 2010 statistics. And while the wage gap has shrunk, women still earn a staggering 68 percent less than their male colleagues. South American women are also twice as likely as men to be unpaid workers.

As a public figure who frequently invokes "dignity" in appealing to the hearts and minds of his followers, the Catholic leader would do well to address the results of a recent poll in which Latin Americans were found to be the least likely in the world in 2012 and 2013 to describe women in their countries as treated with respect and dignity. A median of 35 percent of adults across 22 Latin American countries said their women are treated this way--about half the percentages in any other region of the world.

Of the little research that exists, the statistics on violence against women in Latin America are gruesome. A recent U.N. report published in the Economist found that a woman is assaulted every 15 seconds in Sao Paulo, Brazil's largest city. It states that in Colombia, "attacks in which acid is thrown at women's faces, disfiguring them, nearly quadrupled between 2011 and 2012." Moreover, of the 25 countries in the world that are high or very high in the U.N.'s ranking for femicides (killings of women that seem to be related to their sex), more than half are in the region.

Research shows that when women have access to contraception and are educated to make responsible choices, their income, employment and education levels rise, as do their children's. As women's choices expand, they have fewer unassisted labors and backstreet abortions, meaning maternal mortality is reduced, and, depending on the type of contraception used, life-limiting sexually transmitted diseases are contained.

But because the Vatican considers women second-class citizens, it goes without saying that the pope will not mention abortion or contraception during his South American tour.

Figures show that of the 4.4 million abortions performed in Latin America in 2008, 95 percent were unsafe, and about 1 million women are hospitalized annually for treatment of complications from such procedures. In this context, it should be noted that the pope has described the abortion-rights movement as a "culture of death" and has opposed Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner's efforts to distribute free contraceptives.

Francis has shown himself capable of influencing policy (he was most recently hailed as instrumental in restoring diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba), but as Jemima Thackray writes in The Telegraph, "the Catholic Church's growth is coming from non-European countries where the so-called 'liberal' issues of sexual equality are considered less important."

As much as he has advocated "rethinking the outdated criteria which continue to rule the world," Francis has repeatedly embraced the traditional Catholic view that a woman's role is in the home. Extolling the role of women specifically as mothers by declaring "the presence of women in a domestic setting" as crucial to "the very transmission of the faith," Francis has said, "I think, for example, of the special concern which women show to others, which finds a particular, even if not exclusive, expression in motherhood." Although women may have lives outside the home, Francis has urged us not to "forget the irreplaceable role of the woman in a family."

Given the pope's outspoken views, we've been hoping he'd get around to addressing gender inequality eventually. But lest we forget, the Vatican is--and always will be--a patriarchal institution based on sexual hierarchy. Asked on two occasions about the possibility of admitting women to the ranks of the clergy, Francis has given a firm no. "That door," he said in 2013, "is closed." As Thackray explains, "this is not about having a Western liberal agenda for equality for its own sake, but about acknowledging that in allowing women into positions of influence in the church, this would raise their general status, reducing their vulnerability and poverty. Perhaps," she continues, "it would also help shake up some of the closed male-dominated systems which have caused some of the other worst abuses by the Catholic Church."

It would be no violation of doctrine to recognize women as equally and intrinsically valuable, regardless of their familial role or fertility. Until the pope's vision of equality includes this, it's incomplete.