As the world marked International Women’s Day on Sunday, a report by the United Nations (UN) agency for gender equality, UN Women, said that in the past two decades, progress on gender equality and empowerment has been “unacceptably slow”, no thanks to factors such as climate change, conflict, and global financial crises.
To continue reading, subscribe to Eco‑Business.
There's something for everyone. We offer a range of subscription plans.
- Access our stories and receive our Insights Weekly newsletter with the free EB Member plan.
- Unlock unlimited access to our content and archive with EB Circle.
- Publish your content with EB Premium.
Important gains had been made in areas such as increasing the number of girls going to school, reducing maternal mortality and raising women’s participation in the workforce, said UN Women’s report, “The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action turns 20“.
However, severe shortcomings still persist. For example, violence against women is pervasive worldwide, and in the least developed countries, land ownership still remains skewed in favour of men.
Published on Friday, the report summarises a global study of the progress that has been on commitments made at the Fourth Women Conference in 1995. Government leaders had pledged in Beijing that they would work at “removing all the obstacles to women’s active participation in all spheres of public and private life”.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon presented this study to member states on Monday in New York.
The study found that at the current pace of progress on gender equality, it will take 81 years to achieve gender parity in economic participation, and 50 years to reach parity in parliamentary representation.
Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, executive director of UN Women, said that “the leaders entrusted with the power to realize the promises made in Beijing have failed women and girls”.
Gender parity must be reached before 2030, she said. This is important not only for women’s welfare, it also drives success in achieving other global goals including poverty eradication and sustainable development, said Mlambo-Ngcuka, who on Friday went on to launch a new initiative called ‘Planet 50:50 by 2030: Step it Up for Gender Equality’.
This programme calls on global leaders to commit to ensuring that half of all parliamentarians, university students, business and civil society leaders are women by 2030.
For now, women do not occupy an equal position in areas such as governance, corporate leadership, science and technology, and land ownership, the report found.
For example, in the corporate sector, women hold only a quarter of the jobs in top management and governance; in the technology sector, women hold less than a fifth of all jobs at any level.
In addition, UN Women said that females are still under-represented in political leadership – only one in five parliamentarians is a woman. Women also do most of the world’s low-paid and unpaid work.
Global leaders had also not delivered on the Beijing conference’s call for “the full and equal participation of women and men as agents and beneficiaries of sustainable development,” according to the report.
Bearing the brunt of climate change
“
To be truly transformative, the post-2015 development agenda must prioritize gender equality and women’s empowerment. The world will never realize 100 per cent of its goals if 50 per cent of its people cannot realize their full potential.
Ban Ki-moon, United Nations Secretary-General
Indeed, women are simultaneously among the most vulnerable people to climate change and under-represented in various efforts to mitigate it.
For one thing, women are not equally represented in various delegations to the United Nations that address issues such as climate change, biodiversity and desertification.
Additionally, despite comprising about 43 per cent of the agricultural labour worldwide, women farmers control far less land than men, and also have less access to seeds and funds. In Africa, for example, women account for 70 per cent of crop production, but own only two per cent of the land.
In rural areas, women also spend disproportionately more time on unpaid labour than men, the report found. For example, women in sub-Saharan Africa spend a collective 16 million hours a day collecting drinking water, while men spend 6 million hours on the same activity.
Lack of access to modern energy in many rural areas also leads nearly 3 billion people worldwide to use solid biomass or animal waste to cook their meals and heat their homes. This results in indoor air pollution that causes some 4.3 million premature deaths worldwide, above all among women and children.
The burden of such unpaid work is intensified by unequal access to water, limited mobility and decision making power, said the report, adding that these factors also render poor women more vulnerable to climate change. In many instances, gender inequality can make the difference between life and death in a natural disaster.
For example, UN Women found that women and children are 14 times more likely to die or be injured during a natural disaster than men. Several reasons contribute to this, including the fact that boys receive priority over girls when food is scarce and during rescue efforts.
In order to address these issues, the report recommended that women must have more access and control over land and other resources, play a greater part in decision making at all levels, and that more money be invested in polices and investments that promote gender equality.
Businesses and communities step up
To mark International Women’s Day, business and community groups around the world have launched initiatives to address these disparities.
Stock exchanges in Egypt, Istanbul, Mumbai, Stockholm, Nigeria, Warsaw and New York, for example, worked with UN Women, the UN Global Compact, and the Sustainable Stock Exchanges Initiative to carry out ceremonies to “ring the bell for gender equality”.
Rural women representatives from Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and India also launched a “travelling journal” that will gather stories from 45 women in seven Asian countries on challenges they face, such as hunger, poverty, landlessness and climate change.
A collaborative effort by the Asian Rural Women’s Coalition (ARWC), PAN Asia Pacific (PANAP) and OXFAM’s GROW Campaign in Asia, this project aims to raise public awareness and shape policies that preserve the rights of rural women and small food producers in Asia.
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also urged the international community to “do far more to accelerate progress everywhere”.
Speaking at a UN debate in New York on the role of gender equality and empowerment in the post-2015 development agenda on Friday, he said that “gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls are essential to our sustainable future”.
The post-2015 development agenda is being negotiated by global leaders this year and will include measurable Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which the global community must aim to meet by 2030.
In the run-up discussions, gender equality and women’s empowerment have a central place, said Ban, adding that “to be truly transformative, the post-2015 development agenda must prioritize gender equality and women’s empowerment”.
“The world will never realize 100 per cent of its goals if 50 per cent of its people cannot realize their full potential,” he said.
