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Q&A: Legislation Not Enough to Secure Women’s Rights

Interview with Aruna Rao

ROME, Jul 18 2007 (IPS) - The women’s movement over the last decade has revealed how legislative guarantees and policy reforms do not necessarily result in opening institutional spaces, and that participation does not necessarily translate into influence.

To achieve true empowerment for women, “governments need to focus on supporting gender-sensitive institutional change in the institutions of governance,” says Aruna Rao.

Rao has spent the last 25 years working in support of women’s rights, mainly in Asia, where many women and girls face a number of “traditional family and social barriers to realise their dreams.”

She is director of Gender at Work, a capacity-building network that includes experts, researchers and policy makers who share the view that women’s empowerment must be ‘institutionalised’, particularly in the emerging economies. For this, a deep analysis of the current approach to development is needed, she explains in an interview with IPS correspondent Sabina Zaccaro.

IPS: Which are the most problematic aspects of the modern development approach, and how do these impact women?

Aruna Rao (AR): Three critical aspects of current development approaches are hugely problematic. First, dominant economic models overemphasise growth over the equitable distribution of the fruits of that growth. This means that while a number of developing economies are growing rapidly, the wealth generated does not benefit the poor.

Second, the pattern of decreased social spending, tight fiscal policies, and privatisation of state-owned enterprises and services have had disproportionate negative consequences for the poor, especially women. We are in many places in transition economies where either government infrastructure has completely broken down, such as in conflict zones, or is increasingly becoming privatised. This translates into either no services or increased costs of existing services, taking them out of reach of the poor.

And third, the institutions that are mandated to carry out these economic growth models and development policies are criminally gender blind, often corrupt and unaccountable…to their primary stakeholder, the public.

IPS: What do the growing economies of China and India mean for working women in those countries?

AR: The spectacular rise in the economies of China and India has created new employment opportunities for women and increased access to new information technologies. But increased export-led growth has concentrated wealth in the hands of a few, such as the new class of entrepreneurs in China, while state protections and livelihood guarantees for poor women have crumbled, and trafficking of women and girls has soared. In India, our enormous middle classes have benefited, but in both countries export-led processing zones provide difficult and non-unionised work conditions for women with weak labour protections. There is greater informalisation of employment relations, and increasing exploitation of women and girls.

IPS: Are these countries recording any improvement in basic services, following the economic growth?

AR: In India and to a less extent China, rising wealth has not led to increased investment in basic services to poor women in urban and rural areas. Women are migrating in search of new jobs, but live in burgeoning cities with increasingly under-resourced and inadequate infrastructure – water and sanitation services, housing, electricity, cheap and reliable local transportation, and subsidised food.

IPS: How can women working in informal economies be supported and how can they deal with the fact that they have no, or very restricted access, to credit, natural resources, and land?

AR: In Asia, the share of the informal economy in the non-agriculture workforce ranges from 45-85 per cent, and women’s share in the informal sector is very high and rising. Both in India and China, the government has taken steps to address the needs of workers in the informal sector.

In 1999, the National Commission on Labour in India was set up to develop, implement and enforce labour legislation in the informal economy. In China, the Shanghai Municipal government instituted “informal labour organisations” (by 2001, there were almost 15,000 in Shanghai) and adopted policies – such as extension of basic social insurance, assistance with obtaining credit, preferential tax policies – to promote and assist this sector.

At an international level, in 1997 representatives of SEWA (Self Employed Women’s Association) and HomeNet (an international solidarity network for home based workers) joined other experts on the informal economy to form a global network called Women in Informal Employment: Globalising and Organising (WIEGO). WIEGO works closely with the International Labour Organisation, the United Nations Statistics Division and the Statistics Commission.

IPS: But women’s access to resources is still tricky…

AR: It remains true that women’s access to productive resources is severely restricted. Innovations are more widespread in access to credit following on the very successful Grameen Bank model, and that of SEWA in India, through this has not been widely extended by a national rural bank. But women’s right to land is much more restricted because of big and small obstacles. Even where there is a will within a poor family to put land in women’s name, the registration costs are almost prohibitive.

Clearly there is an important role for both governments in creating a conducive regulatory and support framework, and banks and other institutions in mediating access to resources.

IPS: We are mid-way to 2015. Do you see any key achievement with regard to the third Millennium Development Goal (MDG) on empowering women and on education?

AR: In 2005, the world missed the first agreed MDG target of achieving equal numbers of girls as boys in primary school. The third goal has seen the least progress, especially with respect to women’s economic activity and political representation. The World Bank’s Global Monitoring Report 2007 points out that progress towards gender equality is lagging behind other MDGs and that women’s lack of rights (equality under the law), resources (equality of opportunity) and voice (political equality) all inhibit achievement of this goal.

Moreover, reducing gender equality primarily to eliminate gender disparities in primary and secondary education is simply not acceptable. The Millennium Project (of the United Nations) has provided a much more comprehensive list of goals we should aim to achieve. These include: strengthening opportunities for post-primary education for girls while meeting commitments to universal primary education; to guarantee sexual and reproductive health and rights; investing in infrastructure to reduce women’s and girls’ time burdens; to guarantee women’s and girls’ property and inheritance rights; to eliminate gender inequality in employment by decreasing women’s reliance on informal employment, closing gender gaps in earnings, and reducing occupational segregation; increasing women’s share of seats in national parliaments and local government bodies; combating violence against girls and women.

IPS: What can governments concretely do to drive social and institutional change?

AR: To achieve progress in gender equality goals, governments need to focus on good governance, ensure adequate resources for women’s rights, and make institutions deliver to women. Governance systems play a large part in women’s ability to realise their rights and making their voice heard.

A strategic approach to good governance for women needs to go deeper than normative agreements. It has to address the root causes for the lack of institutional responsiveness to women: the absence of support for gender-equality in agenda-setting processes and resource allocations, coupled with gender biased institutional features (including incentive systems and performance measures), barriers to women’s access to public services, and a lack of gender-sensitivity in accountability systems.

Equally, efforts are needed to sharpen the demand from women for better governance. Women must become more effective in navigating institutional barriers, be skilled in demanding accountability from public actors, be able to expose corruption and other governance failures and to respond to violations of their rights. They need to constitute themselves as a political constituency skilled at demanding and negotiating their rights.