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UN Women Report Shows Realities of Current Gender Gap & Inequalities
World’s Women Progress 2015-2016 Unveils an Alternative Policy Agenda for
Economies & Gender Equality
Young women and girls carry water in Nigeria. Photo:
World Bank
27 April 2015 – A major new report released today in
seven locations around the world by the United Nations entity for gender
equality and women’s empowerment (UN Women)
calls for the transformation of economies to make women’s rights and equality a
reality.
The UN Women report, Progress of the World’s Women
2015-2016: Transforming Economies, Realizing Rights, brings together
human rights and economic policymaking to call for far-reaching changes to the
global policy agenda and imagines what the global economy would look like if it
truly worked for women, for the benefit of all.
“Our public resources are not flowing in the directions
where they are most needed,” said UN Women Executive Director Phumzile
Mlambo-Ngcuka. “For example, to provide safe water and sanitation, quality
health care, and decent child- and elderly-care services. Where there are no
public services, the deficit is borne by women and girls.”
The report’s publication comes as the international
community negotiates a transformative new agenda for sustainable development,
20 years after the landmark Fourth World
Conference on Women, in Beijing, China, which set out an ambitious
agenda to advance gender equality. Despite significant advances in many
societies, particularly in advancing women’s legal rights, millions of women
remain consigned to low paid, poor quality jobs, and lack access to health
care, clean water and sanitation.
Only half of women participate in the formal global
labour force, compared to three quarters of men, with some developing regions
showing 95 per cent of women’s employment informal. That includes unpaid care
work, for which women carry the burden, and which has intensified thanks to
austerity policies and cutbacks.
The global
gender gap in labour force participation:
“This is a care penalty that unfairly punishes women for
stepping in when the State does not provide resources,” said
Ms. Mlambo-Ngcuka. “We need policies that make it possible for both women and
men to care for their loved ones without having to forego their own economic
security and independence.”
The report makes the case that the alternative economic
agenda it outlines would not only create fairer societies, it would also create
new sectors of employment, for instance in the care economy.
“The report is very much focused on picturing an economy
that in working for women does so through providing them a recognition and
valuing of the paid and unpaid care work that they do,” said Lakshmi Puri, the
Deputy Executive Director of UN Women, in an interview
with UN Radio.
The report makes 10 key recommendations for actions that
Governments and others can take to move towards an economy that truly works for
women, dismantling a system in which they are paid on average 24 per cent less
than men globally.
An economy designed with women’s needs in mind would give
them an equal voice in economic decision-making; from the way in which time and
money are spent in their households, to the ways in which resources are raised
and allocated at the national level, to how broader economic parameters are set
by global institutions.
The report sets out a vision of a global economy fit for
women, where they have equal access to productive resources and social
protection, which provides them with sufficient income to support an adequate
standard of living, and where the work they do is respected and valued.
It calls for a paradigm shift in the way governments,
financial institutions, businesses and civil society approach economic policy
thinking and human rights, to bring about an alternative economic agenda which
places women and their rights at its centre.
“Realizing economic and social rights of women enables
the transformation of economies and it also enables empowering of all,
including men and boys,” said Ms. Puri. “When we ask for the economies to be
transformed, it cannot be governance as usual business as usual. The corporate
sector must change. It cannot be labour markets as usual.”