Development & Aid, Gender, Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines, Human Rights, Poverty & SDGs

INT’L WOMEN’S DAY: Time to Rise Up, Activists Declare

Lisa Söderlindh

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 8 2006 (IPS) - International Women’s Day is being celebrated around the world Wednesday against a backdrop of grim statistics clearly demonstrating that gender equality is a long way off.

Women still account for 70 percent of people living in poverty, are paid 20-30 percent less than men, and are increasingly victims of HIV/AIDS.

“We are going to have to rise up as a mass and demand our rights, because they are clearly not being given to us,” Ingrid Charles Gumbs, director of gender affairs for St. Kitts and Nevis, told IPS.

“There must be a greater awakening among women to the fact that we have issues that must be addressed,” she continued.

The need for gender equality and women’s empowerment has been recognised at both the national and international levels. Governments worldwide have committed to documents such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination (CEDAW) and the Beijing Platform for Action adopted at the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995.

Gender equality also features prominently in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), an ambitious set of poverty-alleviation targets to which 189 U.N. member states have committed.

But to this day, “The institutional arrangements, increased resources and strengthened operational mechanisms, essential to assist countries opening up for women to become equal players, have not been made,” Noeleen Heyzer, executive director of the United Nations Development Fund for Women, said as the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) met for its fiftieth session here, which will end Mar. 10.

Women all over the world, particularly in developing countries, continue to fall short in the huge gap between policy and practice.

Women are about 70 percent of the 1.3 billion people living on less than one dollar per day. According to U.N. figures, millions of female workers have been pushed into insecure work in the informal economy, and women are still paid on average 20 to 30 percent less than men in both industrialised and developing economies.

“Rates of HIV/AIDS have been seen rising especially among young women,” according to the World Health Organisation, which notes that last year, 4.9 million people were newly infected.

Women are also underrepresented through all levels of government, and hold only 16 percent of parliamentary seats worldwide.

A U.N. report to the CSW also recognises that the progress of women in areas such as business, academia, civil society, the media and the judiciary, has been even slower than women’s progress in parliaments.

“Business cannot continue as usual, and the rules of the game need to be changed,” Heyzer concluded. She also emphasised the need to strengthen the “gender equality architecture”, and re-envision the resources that underpin gender equality.

“For example, the U.N. Trust Fund to End Violence against Women, which currently operates at under two million dollars annually, must be resourced at a level needed to respond to this global pandemic in women’s lives,” she said.

The need to strengthen the U.N. bodies that work for women’s rights was also stressed by Charlotte Bunch, executive director of the U.S.-based Centre for Women’s Global Leadership.

“What is being called the U.N. ‘gender architecture’ is more like a shack,” she said. “Women need a bigger global house if equality is ever to become a reality.”

Gender equality must be addressed from the grassroots level on up, and “universal resistance is absolutely necessary to end universal discrimination of women”, Charles Gumbs told IPS.

“We are where we are today because our sisters raised the trail,” she said. “The gains that have been made, and that we are now taking for granted, were actually realised through hard work and sacrifice. Therefore, it is our turn to move the process, for the sisters coming behind us.”

Meanwhile, some of the most sweeping changes in the landscape of gender inequality have been seen in a number of developing countries, particularly in Africa and Latin America, panelists and experts at the CSW’s session noted.

The intersection between domestic women’s movements and the international community in supporting the election of women to parliaments in states emerging from conflicts has increased women’s share in high-level decision-making positions. This trend was recently highlighted by the election last year of Africa’s first female president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, in Liberia.

“We come from a devastating conflict that caused impunity, where justice has been denied a lot, where issues of women being raped and abused have been downplayed,” Liberian Gender Minister Varbah Gayflor told IPS.

“But we now have a female president, a female minister of finance, as well as of justice, gender, commerce and sports. We also have a female director of police and female deputy ministers,” she continued.

“So yes, the women are there now, and they are surely going to add something, with their particular eyes, of interest, by pushing for the changes that will help make women’s lives better,” she continued. “These are political women that are doing more than lip service.”

Gayflor said that in many places, gender issues are a new concept that people need to come to understand.

“I remember coming back to Monrovia after having been displaced for two years during the war. Whilst having seen women doing a lot, going to the bush, coming back selling water, doing whatever was needed to keep life running and holding up their families, I now saw these women starting to reach out for help again.”

“So I said to myself, what happened? You were just doing this for yourselves before, but now you’re asking for that helping hand again. Can you do again what you did during the war?”

Gayflor said she started engaging in the process leading up to the enhanced participation of women in Liberian parliament and government structure seen today.

“I took my dress, tied it up, and went from province to province, talking to these women, to come out, to register for elections,” she said.

Thanks to activists like Gayflor, women, who were initially just 20 percent of the country’s 1.3 million registered voters, reached 51 percent of the total registered voters in the October 2005 presidential and legislative elections. “Then the next day we found ourselves saying, ‘let’s move on’. And yes, today we have Africa’s first elected female president,” she said.

“This is just a starting point for us… a process and struggle that women have to go through,” Gayflor continued.

“You have to look at yourself as a trailblazer, because where you succeed, many women will follow. Today, Liberian women have stepped out, and they are not going back. They are going forward.”