LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Tunisia: Men
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A recent study sponsored by CREDIF and the UNDP on women's entrepreneurship showed that in Tunisia, women have difficulty obtaining financing and loans for new enterprises. Women are ... less likely than men to request bank financing and are less willing to carry debt. Of the women questioned in the study, 70 percent said they drew on personal savings to begin their business, although those at the level of micro-enterprise had frequently received credit from an NGO. Despite the obstacles, however, women-owned businesses appear to thrive; the survival rate after five years for women-owned businesses was almost twice as high as for businesses started and owned by men. An estimated 54 percent of women entrepreneurs have secondary or higher education, as opposed to 40 percent of men.
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Sihem Bensedrine, a journalist and founding member of the National Council for Liberties in Tunisia (CNLT), was assaulted on January 5, 2004, as she left her home in downtown Tunis to go to an Internet caf‚. She was accosted by three men in plainclothes, one of whom tripped and then beat and insulted her. Ms Bensedrine accused the police of carrying out the assault; she and other human rights activists have been beaten on previous occasions by men who were never identified or brought to justice. On January 13, 2004, she was turned away at the Interior Ministry when she tried, for the third time since 1999, to register her magazine Kalima. By law, registration is supposed to be a mere formality, but the refusal by authorities to issue a receipt for the notification -a common practice when it comes to independent journals and organizations - makes her publication legally vulnerable.
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The right of women to work is guaranteed by Tunisia's labor law, by all texts regulating the civil service, and by the Collective Labor Agreement. Following the 1993 amendments to the CSP, a new article was added to the labor code that expressly proscribes discrimination between men and women. Furthermore, the principle of "equal skills, equal pay" is in force in the civil service.
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