[Index]
Gender equality: a lot
more needs to be done
Geneva, 15 December 2004 - Ten
years after the Beijing Platform for Action
was adopted the situation of women in
the UNECE region1 has only partly improved
and a lot more needs to be done for its
implementation, especially in the socio-economic
sphere. This is one of the halftone conclusions,
which emerged from the Regional Preparatory
Meeting for the 10-year Review of Implementation
of the Beijing Platform for Action, organized
by the United Nations Economic Commission
for Europe (UNECE) in the Palais des Nations,
Geneva, Switzerland, on 14-15 December
2004.
The discussions have
focused on such issues as the implications
of the social security reforms on women
and retirement schemes; women employability;
women entrepreneurship; gender budgeting;
and the economic roots of trafficking.
Women, the forgotten
partner of social security reforms
A majority of UNECE countries
have engaged in social security reforms,
including family benefits and pensions.
Social security is of key relevance for
women’s employability, and for achieving
equality in the division of unpaid care
work between women and men. However, gender
equality has only been a marginal concern
in the reform processes in the region.
For example, expenditures for family benefits
and family support programmes, as a share
of GDP, have declined in a number of UNECE
countries.
In the field of pensions,
the weakening of repartition pension systems
hurts many women because of their weaker
labour market position. Number of pension
systems penalize those who do unpaid care
work and who work for a lesser number
of years. The situation has in certain
cases so much deteriorated that, following
the assessment of one of the participants,
the “profile of the future poor
of the region will be a single woman aged
more than 46!” (For more details
see Fact sheet 3, ECE/GEN/04/N05).
Deterioration
of women employability
Over the past decade
progress has been made in promoting women’s
employability and in developing new policy
tools, particularly the adoption of gender
mainstreaming within the European Employment
Strategy. Women’s employability
is now seen as not solely a social justice
issue but also a means of achieving a
productive and high employment society.
However, the goals of gender mainstreaming
have not yet been fully achieved; the
approach remains partial, with insufficient
attention paid to either improving the
quality of women’s employment or
bringing about the modernization of the
employment and social systems that is
required for a more gender equal society.
More action is needed to improve women’s
access to employment, to facilitate women’s
continuity of employment; to close the
gender pay gap and remove the disadvantages
of part-time employment; and to promote
shared parental leave and provide more
affordable childcare.
Women’s employability
and access to jobs, particularly quality
jobs, is of serious concern for women
in all countries of Eastern Europe and
the Commonwealth of Independent Sates
(CIS). Trends show gender asymmetry in
absorbing the costs of labour market adjustment,
as reflected in the disproportional cuts
in women’s employment and participation
rates, especially in the early 1990s,
and their increasing concentration at
the lower end of the labour market. Many
women are increasingly forced to turn
to part-time work or other non-standard
jobs or employment in the informal sector,
which offer little or no social protection.
Discrimination is on a rise in a number
of countries, especially in the private
sector. The erosion of the social benefits
has made it more difficult for them to
reconcile full-time employment with family
responsibilities, which now embody more
caring functions. These trends are worrisome
because they suggest a reversal of progress
in women’s employability in these
countries.
Increasing share
of women’s entrepreneurship
During the last ten years
there was a substantive increase in women’s
self-employment in all countries of the
UNECE region as a result of new policy
measures. Progress varied by subregion
and country. Most progress has been made
in North America. In the United States
the number of women-owned businesses grew
by 14 per cent in the last five years,
compared with the average growth of 7
per cent for all businesses. The share
of women’s entrepreneurship increased
in many countries of Western Europe. There
was also progress in countries of Eastern
Europe and CIS, where women’s self-employment
is an important element of poverty reduction.
Challenges remain regarding access to
finance, information and networks, markets
and training.
Limited gender
concern in budget procedures
The UNECE region has
had few experiences in gender responsive
budgets, but is quickly accumulating more
experiences across the national, regional
and local levels. The areas of application
are varied, ranging from tax-benefit systems
to local employment and transport policies.
Projects vary from country to country
but it is more and more taken up by such
countries as Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic,
France, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United
Kingdom and the United States. New initiatives
are under way in Poland, the former Yugoslav
Republic of Macedonia and Hungary.
The main problems relate
to increasing awareness about gender and
budgets, targeting the impact of the initiatives
on concrete results, and guaranteeing
the sustainability of initiatives. The
availability and adaptability of data
for different levels of analysis (national
or sub-national) needs to be improved.
Other areas for improvement are awareness-raising,
further analysis and adaptation of tools,
the continuation of lobbying and/or strengthening
legal or administrative requirements in
the use of public funding such as EU structural
funds and aid money. The commitments to
protecting women’s economic rights
and gender equality should be given the
same status as other international commitments
requiring expenditure by government. (For
more details see Fact sheet 2, ECE/GEN/04/N04).
Economic roots
of trafficking
Over the past decade,
there was a dramatic increase in the number
of women being trafficked from Eastern
Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent
States to North America and Western Europe.
Lack of jobs and increased
poverty, among others, push women to choose
the way of illegal immigration. Dramatic
decrease in real wages and increase in
unemployment are among the major causes
(as an example: by 2001 women’s
wages in the Republic of Moldova reaches
only 1/3 and in Ukraine – 46% of
wage’s level in 1989). Among other
factors are: increased economic insecurity;
limited opportunities for legal immigration;
resurgence of traditional discriminatory
practices against women. Whereas the Czech
Republic and Poland were among the sending
countries in the late 1980s and early
1990s, the Republic of Moldova, the Russian
Federation and Ukraine have become the
main supplying countries since the mid-1990s,
recently, they have been joined by Albania,
Lithuania, Romania and Central Asian countries.
According to the United
States State Department’s Trafficking
in Persons Report of 2004, the annual
supply of women from Eastern, Central
European and CIS countries to the sex
industry of Western Europe has been between
120,000 and 175,000 since 1989. Some European
estimates suggest that, in 1990-1998,
more than 253,000 women and girls were
trafficked into the sex industry of the
12 EU countries. The overall number of
women working as prostitutes in these
countries has grown to more than half
a million. The sex industry in the EU
member States has become one of the most
lucrative businesses. Total annual revenues
of traffickers are estimated to range
from US$ 5 billion to US$ 9 billion a
year. (For more details see Fact sheet
1, ECE/GEN/04/N03).
For further information,
please contact:
Ewa Ruminska-Zimny
Coordinator, Beijing +10 Regional
Meeting
United Nations Economic Commission
for Europe (UNECE)
Palais des Nations – Office
329-1
CH-1211 Geneva 10, Switzerland
Phone: +41 (0) 22 917 16 98
Fax: +41 (0) 22 917 00 36
E-mail: [email protected]
Web site: http://www.unece.org/oes/gender/beijing10.htm
___________
1 North America, Europe
and Commonwealth of Independent States
(CIS).
Ref: ECE/GEN/04/P14