WUNRN
UNDP - United Nations Development
Programme
Governance &
Women’s Empowerment
Empowering
Women is Good (for) Governance
It has
become increasingly clear in recent years that the ability of nations to
achieve their human development goals hinges largely on the quality of
governance. UNDP has been at the forefront of the growing international
consensus that good governance and sustainable human development are
indivisible and that developing the capacity for good governance can be - and
should be - the primary means to eliminate poverty. Gender mainstreaming as an
institutional and cultural transformation process should include eliminating
gender biases in national and international development frameworks and
paradigms; incorporating gender awareness into policies, programmes and institutional
reforms; involving men to end gender inequality; and developing gender
sensitive tools to monitor progress and ensure accountability.
There have been profound changes in the status and role of women over the past two decades. The Beijing+5 review recorded progress in most countries including narrowing gender gaps in education and health. Women have entered the labour force in unprecedented numbers, increasing their potential participation in decision making at various levels, starting with the household. These are important assets for new generations of young women. But the Beijing+5 review also showed such progress to be slow and uneven.
In addition to basic inequalities in access to education and resources, and an unequal share of the burdens of poverty, women continue to be under-represented in formal decision-making structures. Although women are increasingly active in community support systems, gender disparities persist in public positions at all levels: local, national, regional and global. In only 16 countries in the world is women's representation in national parliaments above 25 per cent. On average, they accounted for 11 per cent of parliamentarians worldwide in 1999, compared with 9 per cent in 1987. Despite the fact that the majority of the world's poor are women and girls, poverty reduction strategies insufficiently address the differential impact of poverty by gender and inadequately target gender equality as a core objective.
Whereas women's contributions to the global economy are growing rapidly, women's labour remains undervalued and under-counted in national accounts; and data disaggregated by gender are still poorly developed.
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