No that isn’t me talking (although I agree with the statement), but the Anglican Bishop of Perth (Australia).

Roger Herft has compared Sydney diocese’s refusal to ordain women priests with some Islam thinking that repressed women and gave them status as second-class citizens.
His criticism stands to widen the rift in the Anglican Church over women’s leadership roles just one week after the Sydney synod invoked scriptural authority to effectively block a debate on women priests. Sydney is one of a handful of dioceses in Australia where women are ordained deacons, but not priests.

A report on the state of women’s lives in Afghanistan:

Between 60 and 80 per cent of all marriages in Afghanistan are forced. As many as 57 per cent of girls are married off below the age of 16, some as young as six. Because of the custom of paying a bride price, marriage is essentially a financial transaction, and girls a commodity.
The custom of baad, when girls and women are exchanged to settle debts and disputes, is still widely practised. The women are not treated as proper wives, but in effect are slave workers for their husbands.
…The Taliban were vilified for denying girls education, but even now only 19 per cent of Afghan schools are for girls and only 5 per cent of girls of secondary school age are enrolled.
And the West cannot blame the Taliban, as many of the abuses take place in the north and west, where the Taliban are not active.
In the north-east, where the Taliban never had control, a woman dies every 20 minutes in childbirth.

(By the NGO Womankind Worldwide).

Ayaan Hirsi Ali writing in The Sunday Times:

For a while now I have been asserting that the most effective way for EU governments to deal with their Muslim minorities is to empower the Muslim women living within their borders.
The best tool for that is education. Yet the education systems of some EU countries are going through a crisis of neglect, particularly with regard to immigrant children. And in the matter of faith schools we are now paying the price of mixing education with ideology.
I think religion is taking up far too much time, attention and space in our society. Blair needs to look at the segregation of boys and girls and ask himself why young girls in primary schools are veiled. Are we saying that five and six-year-olds are sexual symbols, “uncovered meat”? As a society we must understand that saving young girls from all kinds of repression is important.

In Nicaragua, to WIN church backing, politicians have passed a law banning all abortions – including those in the case of ectopic pregnancies, which cannot produce a baby but will kill the woman.

Nice to see the Catholic Church’s view of the value of half of the human race laid out so clearly.