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POLITICS: Will Women Be an Afterthought at U.N. Crisis Meet?

Ben Case

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 23 2009 (IPS) - A groundbreaking U.N. General Assembly conference on the global economic crisis and its impact on development, set to begin Wednesday, may sideline women's numerous concerns, civil society groups say.

About 70 percent of the world’s poor are female, and women are typically hit the hardest by economic downturns. The most recent meltdown has been no exception, and its fallout is expected to deepen before getting better.

Taina Bien Aime, executive director of Equality Now, a human rights group focusing on women’s issues, stresses that the ways such crises impact women in particular are profound and complex.

"The repercussions of this financial crisis on women are enormous," Bien Aime told IPS.

"First, it will affect women’s ability to remain financially independent. Then increased poverty is associated with increased violence in the home. If money is too short, girls often get sold into slavery, either sexual or servitude," she said.

Some impacts will continue to harm future generations. "If parents have to make a choice of which child gets educated, girls get left out, which is hugely detrimental to the future of that country," Bien Aime said. "Women and girls are the centre of a community, and these effects on them will impact the entire community."

The General Assembly conference is considered by some observers to mark a key moment for the future of the United Nations, particularly in terms of its role in forging a new, more democratic roadmap for global financial and economic governance.

The three-day meet does include a Women’s Working Group for Financing and Development, and the draft text to be debated by diplomats and heads of state, which was submitted and finalised Monday, mentions the differential impact the economic crisis is having on women.

However, the working group's participants are gender equality and rights activists, not member states or delegates.

"We are counting on member states to recall their commitments to gender equality and women’s economic empowerment," Yassine Fall, economics advisor for the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), told IPS.

"UNIFEM has a limited role in the conference itself, which is essentially for member states," she explained. "What we have been doing is to provide support to a wide range of gender equality advocates and civil society partners to increase awareness among member states of the importance of gender equality issues."

Last week, an international coalition of non-governmental organisations, mostly comprised of women’s groups, issued a four-page declaration calling for a "gender equitable" response to the global financial crisis.

"The United Nations, not the international financial institutions (IFIs), must lead this process," Gigi Francisco, general coordinator of Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), told IPS.

According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), 51 million people are projected to lose their jobs by the end of 2009, 22 million of them women.

These numbers appear to show a heavier toll on men, especially in more developed countries, since a larger number of men have reported losing jobs than women.

But Radhika Balakrishnan, director of the Centre for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University, which focuses on women’s issues in the United States, told IPS that figure alone is misleading.

"More men have lost jobs, but more women have lost their homes, since one of the main targets of predatory lending [in the U.S.] was single mothers," she said.

"Furthermore, when resources are short the time women spend on care increases. Cooking, laundry to save money etc. expand the amount of hours women work. This leads to an increase in stress as well," she noted.

Women who lose their jobs may also have less flexibility to relocate, switch careers or acquire new employment, and the extra labour women pick up in care further reduces their ability to earn an income.

The ILO also acknowledges the likelihood that more women will be pushed into informal and insecure jobs than men, a fact often overlooked by national economic policies.

"Unfortunately, it is unlikely that women will benefit equally from the stimulus packages or fiscal policy measures that only industrialised and middle-income countries can adopt to stimulate renewed growth," Fall told IPS.

"The assumption that men are heads of household too often result in plans that omit targeted strategies to shore up the economic roles that women play and that fail to provide opportunities for women to fully contribute to the recovery process," she said.

And while the General Assembly conference includes a women’s working group to address these issues, according to Bien Aime, that is part of the problem.

"The U.N. is very good at segregating women’s issues," she told IPS. "It is critical to incorporate gender into all issues, that’s where the U.N. fails a lot."

"They reserve an afternoon for women, almost as an afterthought," she added.

Gender is an issue the U.N. has long struggled to properly address, even within its own structure.

According to a 2008 report by the office of the secretary-general, progress in the percentage of women represented in professional and senior appointed posts at the U.N. over the past decade was "disturbingly slow", with only a three percent increase in female representation since 1998.

"It’s very necessary to have women in politics, to have women in society who come into power," Barbara Prammer, president of the Austrian parliament, told IPS in May. "We need women in leading positions in the economy, everywhere, I’m deeply convinced."

The U.N.’s official summary of the conference states explicitly that one of its main goals is to mitigate the impacts of the crisis on "vulnerable populations", but nowhere are gender issues specifically noted.

The draft resolution, submitted Monday, makes simple mention of gender issues and asserts the importance of "correcting imbalances… and having a strong gender perspective."

The conference was originally scheduled for Jun. 1 to 3, and General Assembly president Miguel d’Escoto completed a draft outcome document in May, but it made no mention of gender issues whatsoever and was scrapped when the conference was postponed.

The new statements mark a possible change in attitude towards gender issues, and Fall told IPS she is confident this resolution will be approved. "The draft outcome is virtually agreed upon," she said.

Still, the voice women’s rights groups have in the conference and the action taken as a result remain to be seen.

Prammer expressed pessimism to IPS in May. "Whenever the situation is difficult, you hear – like I hear in Austria – ‘Oh, it’s not simple at the moment. We have the financial crisis. We have to solve the problems there. Please do not speak about the gender issue. Do it afterwards,’" she said.