Women represent 70 percent of the 1.3 billion people in our world who live in absolute poverty. Consequently, as Joan Holmes, president of the Hunger Project, points out, any realistic efforts to change patterns of chronic hunger and poverty require changing traditions of discrimination against women.

Difference is not equated with superiority or inferiority, dominating or being dominated, being served or serving.

For Islamic fundamentalists male "honor" is equated with control over the women in a man's family - to the extent that killing a woman who makes her own sexual choices (like marrying without her father's consent) is considered honorable, rather than criminal.

As long as women and the "feminine" such as caring and caregiving are devalued, we cannot realistically expect more caring economic policies. Young people have a major role to play in creating a caring economics.

This notion that man can, and should, have absolute dominion over the "chaotic" powers of nature and woman...is what ultimately lies behind man's famous "conquest of nature" - a conquest that is today puncturing holes in the earth's ozone layer, destroying our forests, polluting our air and water, and increasingly threatening the welfare, and even survival, of thousands of living species, including our own.

Care work is still primarily done by women for free in families and for poverty wages in the market, and this is a major reason that worldwide women are the mass of the poor and the poorest of the poor.

At the core of every child is an intact human.