As I listened to Gov. Jim Edgar's "State of the State" message on January 10, my thoughts returned to the fourth world conference on women held in Beijing, China, last September.

What caused my mind to connect these two seemingly unrelated events? Edgar's goals for the coming legislative session called to mind the challenge issued by the conference participants. The women who went to China asked policy-makers throughout the world to weigh the "gender impact" of each decision they make in the coming year. And they offered a set of guidelines for doing that.

In fact, the political controversy surrounding the Beijing site for the conference has tended to obscure its substantive accomplishments, the prime one being the adoption of the "Platform for Action." The platform is a detailed map setting out a series of mileposts and specific directions for reaching them, to be undertaken by nations, subnational units of government and nongovernmental organizations in order to empower women, to eliminate violence against women, to invest in women's health and to ensure women's access to all levels of political and economic life.

In my view, the map drawn up in Beijing needs to be used to guide policy-makers in the nation and in Illinois, specifically alerting them to carefully consider the gender impact of policies and proposed changes.

Before examining a portion of the terrain covered by the map, I should briefly explain how I got to Beijing and what I observed there. I have attended all of the international women's conferences, including the inaugural one in Mexico City in 1975. Each one has been a unique, educational, stimulating and energizing experience.

In March of 1995, I was invited by the American Council on Education to attend a meeting in New York of 15 women college presidents from 12 countries to discuss how we could help women influence policies that affect them. As a result of that meeting, I participated in a workshop in Beijing designed to identify women in higher education interested in developing new generations of women leaders. Incidentally, the room was packed and the discussion was lively.

The world conferences on women are divided into two separate meetings, one involving official government delegations representing UN member or observer states, and a second involving nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The NGO meetings welcome anyone who wants to come. In the best of all worlds, the two conferences support and interact with each other. I attended some of both sessions in Beijing.

Clearly, the Chinese government was apprehensive about the NGO meeting and moved it some distance from Beijing.

In China, I saw signs of progress from the previous meetings. For example, delegates from the Middle East were speaking to each other, not trying to shout each other down.

The official meeting in Beijing produced the "Platform of Action." Each nation had one vote on acceptance or rejection of the document. By their vote, countries committed themselves to goals, standards of behavior and actions.

The platform was the result of a great deal of compromise and accommodation, which is to be expected when many different cultures and perspectives must be considered.

I will mention just two of the related issues raised by the platform.

One involves the "girl child": the sex discrimination facing girls at each stage of their development from conception to death. In some countries, fetuses identified by pre-birth tests as girls are aborted. In addition, girls receive less adequate medical care, are subjected to more difficult living conditions and, in extreme circumstances, may actually be allowed to die from neglect.

While the "girl child" issue may have particular significance in societies and cultures in which females are less valued than males, it has its counterpart in industrialized societies in more subtle forms of discrimination, such as the "glass ceiling."

The second — vitally connected — issue is women's health. The scope of this issue is vast, ranging from female genital mutilation to various forms of violence against women to HIV/AIDS to overmedication and inappropriate use of sophisticated technology.

And, for those who do not believe that domestic violence against women is both a health problem and an American issue, consider this fact: More

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babies are now being born with birth defects as a result of abuse during pregnancy than from a combination of all other diseases for which pregnant women are now immunized.

The platform of a conference held in Beijing may appear remote from the lives of Illinois women, but it should not be. The platform provides a set of standards against which to judge Illinois laws and conditions.

As the "Report to the President from the United States Delegation to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women" has said: "The consensus reached in Beijing will now serve as a standard toward which each government should strive, spurred on by the network of nongovernmental organizations that was so effective and central to the discussions in preparation for the conference and in Beijing itself."

Currently, proposed policies are routinely examined by legislative bodies for their fiscal or environmental impacts. Likewise, in Congress and in the Illinois General Assembly, legislators and nongovernmental organizations need to scrutinize proposed, as well as existing, laws for their "gender impact," in particular for the degree to which they would contribute to or detract from the objectives agreed upon at the U.N. conference.

For example, the national and state governments are currently considering various proposals for welfare reform. As many have pointed out, any welfare form that does not take into account the needs of working mothers for health care is destined to fail. This brings us to the connection between Beijing and Springfield. In his "State of the State" address, Gov. Edgar proposed a major reorganization of the way social services are administered and delivered in Illinois by the creation of a superagency. Many of the services of this new agency — including Aid to Families with Dependent Children — primarily affect women and their children. The proposed reorganization of the delivery of social services needs to be examined with the interests of women clearly in focus. From my experience in Kansas, where a superagency in human services was created, there may be a great benefit of reorganization if single parents are able, in effect, to do "one-stop shopping." On the other hand, care must be taken to ensure that creation of a larger bureaucratic entity does not create a "one size fits all" mentality in which flexibility to respond to the circumstances of particular clients is reduced. It would be naive to suppose that the "Platform of Action" could be totally implemented in what remains of this century. However, it does provide a clear map of where we should be heading as we approach the 21st century. The NGO forum in China was organized around the theme "Look at the World through Women's Eyes." The time has come for decision-makers — men and women — to look at the legislative agenda "through women's eyes." Women can no longer be silent on the issues that affect them. As a young poet from India wrote: "We seek only to give words to those who cannot speak.... I seek only to forget the sorrow of my grandmother's silence." Naomi B. Lynn is chancellor of the University of Illinois at Springfield. She served for four years as president of the former Sangamon State University, which joined the U of I system. Chancellor Lynn is a past president of the American Society for Public Administration and a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.

Naomi B. Lynn (center) visited the Forbidden City last September during her trip to China for the fourth U.N. conference on women in Beijing. She was joined by Ginger Purdy (left) and Lynn's sister, Ruth Burgos-Sasscer, who is president of San Antonio College in Texas. The conference issued a "Platform of Action" to guide policy-makers around the world in considering the "gender impact" of their decisions, including proposals that could address domestic violence, the needs of working mothers and their children, and women's health.

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