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Gender equality
United nations Research Institute for Social Development
United nations Research Institute for Social Development
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ES-GE-e_2000.pdf
Adobe PDF, 468.99 KB
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Abstract
"Ten years after the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing an important question that many women’s organizations around the world will be asking is how much has been achieved in the past decade? For those interested in the quest for gender equality, the answers are difficult to find as well as being ambiguous. There have clearly been some notable gains for women over the period: increased visibility in elected assemblies and state institutions; some closing of gender gaps in primary, and to a lesser extent secondary, school enrolment; a larger female presence in the labour market and in labour flows that cross international borders; and lower fertility rates. Such changes in women’s lives are associated with the social transformations that attend economic development, but they are not simply the by-product of economic growth. In many instances change in women’s social position has been instigated or accelerated by state reforms and social movements. Women’s movements, both national and transnational, took advantage of the changed political context of the 1990s to advance women’s rights. One of the remarkable achievements was in bringing issues of sexual and reproductive health and rights, violence against women, and inequality of power in gender relations to the centre of global and national debates. The persistence of gender inequalities Such positive outcomes must be qualified in the light of continuing gender inequalities, and a less than favourable economic and political environment. Despite women’s greater numerical presence in the world of work and in the domain of politics, the narrowing of these broadly defined gender gaps conceals marked gender asymmetries and segmentation, which place limits on women’s access to income, authority and power. Declining fertility continues to improve women’s life chances in their reproductive years in many countries, but in some countries it has also been associated with an increase in artificially high ratios of males to females in the population, because of discriminatory behaviour towards females. At a more general level, the ambivalent nature of women’s achievements is illustrated in the “feminization” of the labour force, whereby women’s access to paid work has increased in most countries, but coincided with a deterioration in the terms and conditions of work for many. There is no single explanation for these various outcomes. Gender inequalities are deeply entrenched in all societies, and are reproduced through a variety of practices and institutions, including policy interventions. A question posed in this report is: what contribution does development policy make to bringing about favourable or unfavourable conditions for achieving greater gender equality?"(pg 5)
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2005-02
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9290850531
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With permission of the license/copyright holder