Posted 03/09/2009 - 23:01 by admin
More than 1000 women from all over the world are currently gathered at the United Nations headquarters in New York to participate in the annual session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). In the midst of the two-week consultations, debat es and exchanges, on March 8th, lies International Women's Day, the yearly event celebrating women’s achievement in economic, political and social life. In some countries like Russia, Vietnam and Bulgaria, International Women’s Day is even a public holiday. A good moment to ask: how does gender equality fare today – 98 years after the first celebration of the IWD.
Beyond doubt, the situation of women has considerably improved over the past decades: access to education is no longer a privilege for boys; the literacy ratio – an indicator of equal advancement in education between boys and girls – is constantly narrowing, indicating that girls are catching up and sometimes even surpassing their male counterparts. Similar success stories can be found in other areas that are crucial for women’s empowerment, such as health care, participation in the labour market and political representation in parliaments.
However, digging a little deeper and looking beyond the surface of these undeniable successes, the picture still looks rather gloomy. Take the example of economic opportunities: While female labour force participation in the non-agricultural sector has increased steadily, women often occupy so-called “bad jobs” - those with low pay, insufficient access to social security, and no upward mobility. A similar picture emerges considering the quality of women’s educational attainment, health status and political representation: women are underrepresented in higher education, frequently denied access to high-quality health care and barely appointed to top positions in governments.
How can this situation be explained? One important, but often ignored factor is people’s mind-set that is still hostile to further advancements in gender equality. In many countries, traditions, social norms and informal laws can be identified as the decisive factors that prevent women’s social and economic empowerment. Putting a number on these hidden forms of discrimination, the newly created Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) of the OECD Development Centre provides a radical new look on the underlying reasons of persisting gender inequality.
Empirical analyses show the relevance of this new measure: in countries with unfavourable attitudes towards women’s empowerment – such as Sudan, Afghanistan and Mali – women perform relatively weak compared to their male counterparts, in areas as diverse as educational attainment and labour force participation. The new index also shows that standard development policies are inappropriate to change this situation. Building more schools or giving micro-credit to women risk being ineffective when traditions forbid girls to leave the house alone after puberty or deprive them from access to land, technology and information.
In many countries, making sustainable progress in gender equality will require a deep transformation of traditions and social norms that have often been in existence for centuries. Change might not be possible over night, but a multi-layered approach – including institutional and legal reforms, better enforcement of existing laws, and information campaigns to win the support of the population – can work towards achieving sustainable results in the long run.
Preventing 50 % of the world’s population from equal access to resources, opportunities and basic human rights is not only morally despicable, but will prove very costly economically. This is even more the case in these times of economic turmoil. Crises have often proved to be a trigger for painful, but necessary reforms. Maybe now is the time to engage into reforms that touch upon the core of persisting gender inequalities
