Topic: Politics
I read a long time ago that Iraq was 62 per cent female. I wish I'd bookmarked where I read it, because when I tried to track down the statistic, I could only source it to this:
http://www.portaliraq.com/news/Conference+targets+woman-owned+businesses__671.html
which states:
"Women are 62 percent of the population and represent tremendous intellectual and human resource pool."
Has anyone got a better source? If true, then it's a shocking revelation of the horrors of the Saddam era. Even if the coalition forces have killed the number claimed in the Lancet report of 2004 (100,000), that does not in any way explain a 62 to 38 female - male ratio in a country of over 20 million people. When Mark Steyn drove around Iraq in 2003, he said that he encountered many families that were almost entirely female, so many men having been killed in the wars against Iran and Kuwait, as well as the hundreds of thousands killed in the Al Anfal campaign and the suppression of the uprising against Saddam in 1991.
I've even read it claimed that one reason why the Americans underestimated the level of post-war violence was that they believed that the high level of women relative to men in Iraq would have a pacifying effect.
I know that I have at least one Iraqi reader. Would any care to comment on the gender split, please?
