More ground to cover to attain gender equality
By People Reporter, September 20, 2019By Patricia Scotland
Nairobi is hosting the Commonwealth Women’s Affairs Ministers Meeting which kicked off yesterday. The forum, held since 1985, aims at taking stock of the current status of gender equality in member countries, and to share perspectives and experience of how progress on this important Commonwealth priority can be achieved more swiftly.
Recommendations and decisions made by ministers responsible for women’s affairs and gender will go forward to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting scheduled for Rwanda next year.
The past century has witnessed the greatest advances for gender equality in human history. From New Zealand becoming the first self-governing country in 1893 to allow women to vote in parliamentary elections to Sri Lanka electing the world’s first female Prime Minister in 1960, the gender gap has never narrowed so quickly, but there is still much ground to be gained.
To assess and accelerate progress, considerable efforts are now made by multilateral organisations to measure progress against indicators linked to gender equality and women’s empowerment. For instance, a girl is today as likely to attend primary school as a boy, and in some countries more so. In the parliaments of 13 Commonwealth countries, 30 per cent or more of members are women.
Yet against this progress, underlying systemic inequality remains persistent and widespread.
In politics, only one in five parliamentarians is a woman. In education, of every 10 girls only seven attend secondary school. In the workplace, the law in 32 countries does not mandate equal remuneration for work of equal value.
That is according to research undertaken by the Commonwealth Secretariat in preparation for the Nairobi meeting. This research offers a snapshot of progress towards gender equality within and across the Commonwealth in four priority areas—women in leadership, women’s economic empowerment, ending violence against women and girls, and gender and climate change.
On women in leadership, Commonwealth countries collectively have declared their ambition is to ensure 30 per cent of the political sphere is made up of women. This is a step on the way to achieving gender parity. Rwanda is one of only three countries in the world to have achieved gender parity, with over 55 per cent of seats occupied by women in Parliament.
On economic empowerment, gender gaps in enrolment and achievement in education have narrowed, but this has not yet translated satisfactorily into women’s equal participation in the formal labour force, or the elimination of the gender pay gap.
The pan-Commonwealth average for female labour force participation is 56.30 per cent, which means that only just over one in two of women work in the formal sector. Rwanda, at 86 per cent, has the highest percentage of women’s participation in the labour force. Our analysis shows a disjunction in the transition from primary to secondary schools for girls, largely due to factors such as the cost of education, child marriage or labour, and violence against girls.
Prevalence of violence against women and girls remains high throughout the world, despite advances in women’s economic status, leadership and agency.
Of the 53 Commonwealth member countries, 47 have laws against domestic violence; 20 have legislation that explicitly criminalises marital rape; 40 have legislation against sexual harassment; and nine have legislation that offers broad protections for LGBTI people.
Despite being high on the international agenda since the UN Conference on Environment and Development in 1992, the issue of gender and climate change has still not achieved its due recognition.
Through mutual support and cooperation—and particularly through the Women Affairs Ministers Meetings—the Commonwealth member countries will continue to put in place laws, policies, plans and programmes to address gender inequality and women’s empowerment. It is clear for gender equality to become a reality, responsibility for action has to be mainstreamed across the political sphere, public and private sectors, and civil society.
This approach is a key tenet of the Beijing Platform for Action, and as we approach the 25th anniversary of that declaration, there is a special opportunity to focus on the contributions it can make towards national policy-making, budgeting, planning and service delivery.
—The writer Commonwealth Secretary General