Hawaii’s good for women, yes, but it’s no paradise

ndoubtedly, there are women who would argue with a report this week that

concluded Hawai’i generally is paradise for women.Differing viewpoints

might come from mothers – single and married alike – who struggle to keep

enough food on their families’ tables. And women whose husbands were laid off

Friday by Amfac Sugar Kaua’i, creating agonizing doubt about where and when the

next paycheck will be earned. And females outraged by state law that allows

14-year-old girls to have consensual sex with adults.

Those are on the dark

side of the report issued by the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Women’s

Policy Research. The organization didn’t do its research of Hawai’i from afar.

An advisory committee of the Hawai’i State Commission on the Status of Women

contributed information that enabled the insitute to compare the Aloha State

with the rest of the U.S. And in that regard, Hawai’i did extremely well in

several categories, checking in with the lowest death rate from heart disease

and breast cancer and the second-lowest cancer death rate. Hawai’i also ranked

third among all states for its birth and family planning services, had the

11th-highest total of women with four or more years of college education, and

got good marks for its percentage of women who own businesses.

Still, the

report didn’t ignore Hawaii’s distaff negatives. It ranked Hawai’i in the

“worst half” of the 50 states for the level of poverty among women, noting that

single mothers struggle to survive, seven of every 10 women who are jobless do

not collect unemployment benefits, and most child-support payments from fathers

are not collected.

In the political arena, where women’s issues overall

might be better-served by a better track record of female involvement, Hawai’i

ranks 49th in the number of women who are registered voters (correlating with

its near-the-bottom voter turnout by females in the 1992 and 1996 elections),

and has relatively few women in state office. The lieutenant governor is a

woman, but only 17 of Hawaii’s 76 state legislators were women during the

1999-2000 period of the study.

On that note, two of the three state

representatives for Kaua’i are women, making our island better than the

statewide trend that sees far too few women elected to state leadership. Could

that overall shortfall be a reason why, as the report points out, the Hawai’i

Legislature, even though 92 percent of the state’s women are covered by health

insurance compared to a nationwide average of 82 percent for females, hasn’t

kept up with other states in requiring insurers to cover the cost of screenings

for cervical cancer and osteoporosis, plus inpatient care for

mastectomies?