According to a 50-year-old Chinese saying 'women hold up half the sky'. Today women make up more than half of the world's population. References to the Chinese saying can be found, for example, in the publication by Nicholas Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn entitledHalf the sky: Turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide(2009), who declared the global struggle for women's equality 'the paramount moral challenge' of our era. It is obvious that although the issues of gender equality have been addressed in many documents (including international law documents), girls and women all...