by SI UN Rep Marie D’Amato-Rizzi 

 

Click on the image above to view the PDF of ‘Progress of the World’s Women 2015 – 2016: Transforming Economies, Realizing Rights’

On
Monday, April 27, 2015 UN Women launched their flagship report on the Progress
of Women at a press briefing and a meeting and panel discussion.  The report comes at an historic time as the
United Nations is in the midst of preparing for the Third Financing for
Development conference in July and the Post 2015 agenda in September.

Lakshmi
Puri, Assistant Secretary General and Deputy Executive Director of UN Women
spoke about gender equality being a human rights issue.  While much progress has been made since
Beijing, the changes have not yet resulted in equal outcomes for women. The
report poses the question, “at a time when women and girls have almost equal
opportunities when it comes to education, why are only half of women of working
age in the labor force globally, and why do women still earn much less than
men?”

Ms.
Puri calls for the:

·        
Transformation of paid and unpaid work–paid work must be
compatible with women’s and men’s shared responsibility for unpaid care work

·        
Social policies to support women–including family
allowances, unemployment benefits and pensions

·        
Macroeconomic policies to support women—to date these
policies have been treated as gender neutral. 
These policies need to pursue a broad set of social objects not just
inflation reduction.  These policies need
to stimulate economic activity and increase demand for labor

·        
An international enabling environment—the growing integration
of the world’s economies means that actions taken by one government affect the
realization of rights elsewhere

During
the panel discussion, there was much stress placed on unpaid work and social
policies.  The panelists included:

                        Myrtle
Witbori — President International Domestic Workers Federation

                        Hania
Sholkamy — Professor, Social Research Center – American University, Cairo

                        Shahra Razavi — Chief,
Research and Data Section, UN Women

“Why
is it so hard to achieve these goals?” 
There needs to be a practical, fair, real world approach that recognizes
gender norms i.e. the family.  There
needs to be social pension funds.  The
issue of women aging needs to be addressed as they are typically the care
givers but they live longer. 

The
wish list:

·        
One should not be penalized for family choices.  Society benefits from the “free” work that
women do.

·        
Equality and equal rights for women

·        
Give real choices to people in terms of paid and unpaid work
to both women and men

·        
The right to care and the right to be cared for

The
report proposes 10 priorities for public action (the 10 commandments):

1.      Create more and better
jobs for women

2.      Reduce occupational
segregation and gender pay gaps

3.      Strengthen women’s income
security throughout the life cycle

4.      Recognize, reduce and
redistribute unpaid care and domestic work

5.      Invest in
gender-responsive social services

6.      Maximize resources for the
achievement of substantive equality

7.      Support women’s
organizations to claim rights and shape policy agendas at all levels

8.      Create an enabling global
environment for the realization of women’s rights

9.      Use human rights standards
to shape policies and catalyse change

10.  Generate evidence to
assess progress on women’s economic and social rights