Gender Equality Policy Issues
Policy
The human rights of women and girls are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights, as set out in the United Nation's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The struggle for these rights has gained enormous momentum during the past two decades, combining analysis and activism and creating many new organizations and coalitions, policies and laws.
Approaches and strategies for achieving women's rights and gender equality have evolved substantially from the 1975 International Women's Year World Conference in Mexico City, through the Women's World Conferences and NGO Forums of 1980 (Copenhagen), 1985 (Nairobi), to the series of UN world conferences and NGO Forums of the 1990s that culminated in the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing.
The 1995 Beijing Conference resulted in the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, an action plan which is being monitored by the UN Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW) and through a UN General Assembly Special Session (Beijing +5): Gender Equality, Development and Peace for the 21st Century, which took place in New York, June 2000. The DAW is part of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat and advocates the improvement of the status of women and for achievement of their equality with men.
See:
UN Division for the Advancement of Women: www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/
Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action: www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/platform/
Changing Approaches: from WID to GAD
Initial efforts to include women in development interventions aimed at improving women's welfare - and defined women mainly in terms of their conventional reproductive roles. During the seventies, development agencies began to recognize the importance of women's economic roles as well, and Women in Development (WID) policies were introduced with the goal of integrating women into development programs. The United Nations' Decade for Women (1976-85) played a crucial part in highlighting the important but previously invisible roles of women in the social and economic development of Third World countries and communities, and the particular plight of low-income women. But the resulting programs and projects did not address inequalities between men and women because they focused solely on women.
By the end of the eighties, WID was seen as inadequate because it failed to deal with the inequalities between men and women, and the continuing subordination of women. Gender became the key category of analysis in a new approach called gender and development (GAD)
The GAD approach differs from WID in three major ways. First, the focus shifts from women to gender and the unequal power relations between women and men. Second, all social, political and economic structures and development policies are re-examined from the perspective of gender differences. Third, it is recognized that achieving gender equality requires "transformative change."
In this reorientation, the politics of gender relations and the restructuring of institutions are to be the focal points of development programs, rather than simply equality in access to resources. 'Gender mainstreaming' has emerged as the common strategy for action behind these initiatives.
In 1997, the UN Economic and Social Council adopted the following definition of gender mainstreaming, meant as a guide for all agencies in the United Nations system:
Mainstreaming a gender perspective is the process of assessing the implications for men and women of any planned action, including legislation, policies and programmes, in all areas and at all levels. It is a strategy for making women's as well as men's concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political, economic and social spheres so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated. The ultimate goal is to achieve gender equality. (Economic and Social Council, Agreed Conclusions, 1997/2).
(From: United Nations, 1999, 1999 World Survey on the Role of Women in Development: Globalization, Gender and Work, p.ix)
The Beijing Platform for Action
The Beijing Platform for Action, the final document of the Fourth United Nations World Conference on Women, represents the commitment of 189 nations to support women's empowerment, guarantee women's human rights and achieve gender equality.
National governments committed themselves to promoting gender equality in the formulation of all government policies and programs. They identified twelve common critical areas of concern for particular attention: poverty; education and training; health; violence against women; armed conflict; economy; power and decision-making; institutional mechanisms for gender equality; human rights; media; environment; and the girl child.
See: www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/platform/
More information and publications are available from the International Women's Tribune Centre and its distribution initiative Women, Ink. at www.womenink.org
ŠNDRC 2000-2006