This Sunday (March 8, 2020) will mark the 109th International Women’s Day. Progression towards gender equality has been uneven, in some respects the lives of women have improved markedly since the first celebration of this day back in 1911. However, a report released by UN Women on Friday, 6th March 2020 titled: Gender equality: Women’s rights in review 25 years after Beijing shows that progress towards true gender equality remains slow.
The report reflects on what progress has been made over the last 25 years, since the landmark gender equality plan – the Beijing Platform for Action – was launched, calling for greater parity and justice for women.
The report shows that there has been faltering progress and in many cases, hard-won advances for gender equality are being reversed by unchecked inequality, climate change, conflict and prohibitive politics.
The review finds that there has been a lack of effective action to boost women’s representation in key decision-making and warns that achieving the aims of the Beijing platform will remain impossible until the rights of all women and girls are acknowledged and prioritised.
Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, UN Women’s Executive Director said:
“The review of women’s rights shows that despite some progress, no country has achieved gender equality… equality isn’t just one-quarter of the seats at the tables of power… [however that is] the current reality of women’s representation, across the board”
Men currently hold 75 percent of all parliamentary seats globally, 73 percent of all managerial positions and make up 70 percent of climate negotiators as well as most peacemaking roles.
The UN Women chief went on to say: “Only half is an equal share and only equal is enough”.
Fair representation and the equality of women in governments, boardrooms, education and health are all crucial to ensuring that gender equality is achieved. Especially in light of the report published by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) on Thursday, 5th March 2020 that found nearly 90 percent of all people have a ‘deeply ingrained bias’ against women.
The study analyzed data from 75 countries, which collectively home more than 80 percent of the global population, and found ‘new clues to the invisible barriers women face in achieving equality – potentially forging a path forward to breaking through the so-called “glass ceiling”.’
The data did find that real progress had been achieved in some areas. Pedro Conceição, the head of UNDP’s Human Development Report Office said on launching the report:
“We have come a long way in recent decades to ensure that women have the same access to life’s basic needs as men…we have reached parity in primary school enrollment and reduced maternal mortality by 45 percent since the year 1990”.
But ultimately conceded that: “gender gaps are still all too obvious in other areas, particularly those that challenge power relations and are most influential in actually achieving true equality”.
The findings show almost half those polled felt men make for superior political leaders, while more than 40 percent believe they make better business executives and are more entitled to jobs when the economy is lagging. Particularly worrying is that 28 percent still feel it is justified for a man to beat his wife.
The numbers largely mirror the findings of the World Economic Forums: Global Gender Gap Report 2020 which show that currently, gender parity will not be attained for 99.5 years. However, the picture is brighter in some areas such as education, in which 40 of the 153 countries ranked have achieved parity and global parity is attainable in 12 years.
The Women’s Rights in Review report also highlighted instances of progress; fewer women are dying in childbirth, more women are in parliament than at the launch of the platform and there are a greater number of laws supporting women’s equality.
Yet at the same time, women’s access to paid work has ground to a halt and they continue to shoulder the bulk of unpaid care and domestic work – less than two thirds between the ages of 25-54 are in the labour force.
Nearly one-in-five women have faced violence from an intimate partner in the past year, with the advancement of technology only enhancing the problem, such as through cyber-harassment, an issue that governments are still trying to get to grips with and policy lags behind.
Ultimately, we still live in a world where for some women, things that many take for granted are still impossible. In Saudi Arabia and Iran women are prevented from attending and participating in sporting events. In Sudan, women can be flogged for wearing trousers and in North Korea women are forbidden from riding bikes. Even in supposed bastions of hope such as America, ‘land of the free’, we have seen a dozen states adopt anti-abortion laws in 2019.
The theme for this years International Women’s Day is #EachforEqual, purporting that an equal world is an enabled world and that it is up to each and every individual, men and women, to fight to achieve that world. Celebrate our successes and call out and learn from our shortcomings.
We are all individually responsible for the role we play, so own it, we can all contribute to creating a gender equal world.