Your Daily Dose of..FEMALE FACTS!

Here are some facts about the world's women. Read up & learn about yourself! We're pretty interesting creatures...

1. 80% of the 50 million people around the world who are affected by violent conflicts, civil wars, disasters, and displacement are women and children.
2. In 2004, 48.8% of the seats held in parliament in Rwanda were held by women. Contrast that to Cuba where 36% of the seats were held by women, and the USA, where 14.3 % of the seats were held by women.
3. Saudi Arabia and the Solomon Islands are just two countries where there are no women in parliament (UNDP, Human Development Report 2004).
4. In 76 countries, less than half the eligible girls are enrolled in secondary school.
5. Women own only 1% of the world’s land.
6. Approximately three million women in the USA sport tattoos.
7. A Saudi Arabian woman can get a divorce if her husband doesn’t give her coffee.
8. 43% of Australian marriages end in divorce. Of those who remarry, 65% of them will divorce again. By the time you try for marriage number 3, your chance of getting divorced is about 75%.
9. The women of the Tiwi tribe in the South Pacific are married at birth.
10. It is illegal to be a prostitute in Siena, Italy if your name is Mary.
11. The two highest IQ’s ever recorded (on a standard test) both belong to women.
12. In Kenya where 38% of the farms are run by women, those women manage to harvest the same amount per hectare (2.47 acres) as men, despite men having greater access to loans, advice, fertilizers, hybrid seeds, insecticides. And when women were given the same level of help, they were found to be more efficient than men, and produced bigger harvests.
13. Over half a million women die in childbirth every year in Africa and Asia.
14. Nearly 1/2 of all Indonesian women have had their first child by the time they are 17.
15. In the USA, unintended pregnancies account for almost half of all pregnancies.
16. According to The World Health Org., 40% of girls aged 17 or under in South Africa are reported to have been the victim of rape or attempted rape.
17. In Sweden, 76% of mothers work, the highest percentage in the developed world.
18. Australia, New Zealand and the US are among a handful of governments that do not require women to be paid some form of maternity leave. In countries as diverse as Russia, Colombia, Laos and Morocco, the government foots the entire bill for three to six months of maternity leave.
19. By age 55, 95% of all U.S. women have married.
20. Only 5% of Hollywood feature films are directed by women.
21. Today, Japan leads the world in condom use. Like cosmetics, they’re sold door to door, by women.
22. Seventy percent of women would rather have chocolate than sex (Poll taken in a 1995 women’s magazine).
23. Australian women have sex on the first date more than women the same age in the USA and Canada.
24. China is considered the next big marketing opportunity for the tobacco industry because only 3.8% of Chinese women smoke, compared with 63 % of adult males.
25. Women are paid less than men, except for one field: Modeling.
26. The word “woman” is believed to have derived from the Middle English term wyfman, broken down simply as the wife (wyf) of man.
27. Women perform 66% of the worlds work, but receive only 11% of the world's income.
28. Women make up 66% of the world's illiterate adults.
29. Women head 83% of single-parent families.
30. Women accomplish 73% of the world's social work dealing with the elderly and the poor.
31. Women's presence in leadership roles is slowly increasing, but is not even close to 50%.
32. Women account for 55% of all college students, which is a trend that has continued since 1979.
33. There are 6 million more women than men in the world.
34. The number of families nurtured by women alone rose from 5.6 million in 1970 to 12.2 million in 1995.