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Women achievement in the last century (almost)

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The Journey of Women's Rights: 1911-2015

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Interesting video about gender equality on UN women agenda

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Interesting video about gender equality on UN women agenda

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The facts about gender equality and the Sustainable Development Goals

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Date: Tuesday, April 12, 2016
By: UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka
This 12 April is Equal Pay Day in the USA. Pay inequality persists, here and everywhere, and it matters. It matters because it is a blatant injustice and because it condemns millions of women and their families to lives of entrenched poverty. It is a global, systemic problem that needs concerted attention and action.

Women in the USA earn on average 79 cents for every $1 that men earn and identify the gender pay gap as their primary workplace concern. It has obvious immediate repercussions but also directly relates to longer-term impacts such as credit-worthiness, savings, social security benefits and retirement income. Globally, some 200 million women in old age are living without any regular income from an old age or survivor's pension, despite having been in the workforce in earlier life. In the European Union, elderly women are 37 per cent more likely to live in poverty than elderly men.

It is the women who earn least for whom the income discrepancy is most damaging. In the US, African American women earn only 60 cents, Native American women 59 cents and Latinas 55 cents for every $1 that white men earn. Where every dollar counts, pay inequality can be enough to plunge families below the breadline. Income well spent on education, nutrition and health potentially moves a generation out of poverty; insufficient income reinforces the poverty cycle.

In the United States today, married mothers are the primary or co-breadwinners in more than half of families and more than 15.2 million family households are headed by women. One in three of those families have incomes that fall below the poverty level. If the wage gap were eliminated, on average, a working woman in the United States would be able to afford the equivalent of 83 more weeks of food for her family.

Yet it is difficult for mothers to earn a decent wage, and the situation is compounded if other factors combine, for instance disability. The ' motherhood penalty' is larger for low-wage workers, and women in the USA occupy two-thirds of those positions, in childcare centres, or residential homes for older people, as domestic workers and cleaners. This work is critical to the functioning of our economies, but is hugely undervalued. In the USA, golf caddies (who are mostly men) earn an average of $17 an hour; while caregivers (mostly women) are paid just $9 an hour. We will not be able to close the gender pay gap, as long as there are so many women trapped in low paid, undervalued work and as long as working conditions are inflexible.

The male breadwinner model of society has long gone, yet its influence remains. Contemporary economies need a workforce that draws in both men and women, but workplaces are still designed as if workers have no domestic responsibilities. There is need to sensitively accommodate the caring role, provide the flexibility in working hours that real life demands, and apply a similarly realistic appreciation of women's engagement. Ample research exists to demonstrate the scale of that value; conversely, the recognition and significance of men's caring role and responsibility is under appreciated and under served in policy and practice.

In all countries, women work fewer hours than men in paid employment, while performing the vast majority of unpaid care and domestic work. On average, women carry out at least two and a half times more of this work than men. Although wealthier women can pay poorer women to provide care for their families, it can result in a complicated cascade of care, with each level sub-contracting family care to another in order to release time for paid work. At the bottom of the chain, in societies where there is no state support for care services, women must either take on poor quality, part time or informal work that can combine with childcare, or entrust that care to family members or older siblings, sometimes leading to school dropout.

Failure to support the care economy reinforces the gender pay gap in two ways: by undervaluing women's jobs and entrenching women in low paid work; and by limiting women's paid work opportunities, through a lack of affordable care services.

Last month UN Women issued a call to action on closing the gender pay gap, working with key stakeholders to develop an international coalition that will bring urgent progress on equal pay. In addition, addressing the care economy and reducing gender pay gaps are two of six interlinked target issues for the newly formed UN Secretary-General's High Level Panel on Women's Economic Empowerment. This panel includes thought leaders from a spectrum of influence, from the IMF and World Bank to trade unions and civil society, who are confronting the largest obstacles to economic empowerment facing low-income, disadvantaged and marginalized women.[1]

One promising solution is government investment in care services. A recent study by the ITUC and the Women's Budget Group in the UK found that investing in a universal, free childcare system, in which workers are paid a decent wage, would create 1.65 million jobs and reduce the gender pay gap by 3.4 percentage points. Children would get the best start in life, women could stay in the labour market and build their careers, and best of all, most of the investment would be recouped through increased tax revenues and lower welfare spending.

Just last week, the Governors of New York and California each signed bills that will raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, which will disproportionately benefit low paid women. The USA is currently the only OECD country that does not offer paid maternity or parental leave at federal level, however, there is also some progress on this critical issue, with New York pledging to grant 12-weeks of partially-paid leave to private sector workers by 2021, and San Francisco becoming the first US city to require companies of a certain size provide fully-paid parental leave from 2017.

There are no simple solutions, and economic empowerment for women is just one aspect of full gender equality. However, when it comes to tackling the gender pay gap and reducing unpaid care work for women and girls, we urgently need to be finding and implementing effective solutions.

Notes

[1] Eliminating legal barriers to female economic empowerment; Addressing the care economy; Reducing gender pay gaps; Expanding opportunities for women who work informally; Promoting financial and digital inclusion for women; Fostering female entrepreneurship and enhancing the productivity of women-owned enterprises.

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Date: Tuesday, April 12, 2016 By: UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka This 12 April is Equal Pay Day in the USA. Pay inequality persists, here and everywhere, and it matters. It matters because it is a blatant injustice and because it condemns millions of women and their families to lives of entrenched poverty.

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Worldwide, women only make 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. As a result, there's a lifetime of income inequality between men and women and more women are retiring into poverty.

This stubborn inequality in the average wages between men and women persists in all countries and across all sectors, because women's work is under-valued and women tend to be concentrated in different jobs than men. Even though the work itself may require equal or more effort and skills, it's valued and remunerated less. For women of colour, immigrant women and mothers, the gap widens. The so-called "motherhood penalty" pushes women into informal economy, casual and part-time work, and tends to be larger in developing countries than in developed countries.

Join the campaign for equal pay

Join #StopTheRobbery campaign by UN Women to raise awareness of the gender pay gap. Globally, women only make 77 cents for every dollar earned by men, effectively being "robbed". Visit 23percentrobbery.com to spread the word and help stop the biggest robbery in history.

Take five: At the current rate of progress, no equal pay until 2069

Across the world, women still get paid 23 per cent less than men. Chidi King, Director of the Equality Department of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), the main international trade union organization representing the interests of working people worldwide, and a member of UN Women and ILO's Equal Pay Champions initiative, unpacks the issue. What actions are needed to bridge the gender pay gap?
Closing the gender pay gap requires a package of measures, central to which is decent work.

One of the most effective and quickest ways to narrow gender pay gaps is through minimum living wages (or wage floors) and universal social protection. Minimum living wages benefit all low paid workers. Since women are starkly overrepresented in low paid work, it would usually benefit women more dramatically. Germany, for example, recently introduced a national minimum wage to tackle its stubborn gender wage gap of 22.4 per cent. This needs to be backed up by universal social protection...Read the full interview to learn what drives gender pay gap, who's impacted and more"

Other voices:
Take Five: "Managing a company is about managing talents, there's no place for discrimination"

Askar Baitassov, Chief Executive Officer of Kazakhstan's AB Restaurants chain talks about why the company champions gender equality. AB Restaurants is the first company in Central Asia to sign on to the Women's Empowerment Principles (WEPs), a joint initiative of UN Women and the UN Global Compact, which places gender equality at the heart of good business practices. Read more"
Take five: "Women now represent 50 per cent of the company's board members"

Mustafa Seçkin, Vice-President, Unilever N. Africa, Middle East, Turkey, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus talks about how the Women's Empowerment Principles have shaped and improved work place culture and performance at Univeler Turkey. Read more"

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It's the biggest robbery in history-worldwide, women only make 77 cents for every dollar earned by men for work of equal value! As a result, there's a lifetime of income inequality between men and women and more women are retiring into poverty.

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Benefits of economic empowerment

When more women work, economies grow. An increase in female labour force participation-or a reduction in the gap between women's and men's labour force participation-results in faster economic growth [1].

Evidence from a range of countries shows that increasing the share of household income controlled by women, either through their own earnings or cash transfers, changes spending in ways that benefit children [2].

A study using data from 219 countries from 1970 to 2009 found that, for every one additional year of education for women of reproductive age, child mortality decreased by 9.5 per cent [6].

Women tend to have less access to formal financial institutions and saving mechanisms. While 55 per cent of men report having an account at a formal financial institution, only 47 per cent of women do worldwide. This gap is largest among lower middle-income economies as well as in South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa [7].

The world of work

Women continue to participate in labour markets on an unequal basis with men. In 2013, the male employment-to-population ratio stood at 72.2 per cent, while the ratio for females was 47.1 per cent [8].

It is calculated that women could increase their income globally by up to 76 per cent if the employment participation gap and the wage gap between women and men were closed. This is calculated to have a global value of USD 17 trillion [12].

Women bear disproportionate responsibility for unpaid care work. Women devote 1 to 3 hours more a day to housework than men; 2 to 10 times the amount of time a day to care (for children, elderly, and the sick), and 1 to 4 hours less a day to market activities [13]. In the European Union for example, 25 per cent of women report care and other family and personal responsibilities as the reason for not being in the labour force, versus only three per cent of men [14]. This directly and negatively impacts women's participation in the labour force.

Gender inequalities in time use are still large and persistent in all countries. When paid and unpaid work are combined, women in developing countries work more than men, with less time for education, leisure, political participation and self-care [15]. Despite some improvements over the last 50 years, in virtually every country, men spend more time on leisure each day while women spend more time doing unpaid housework [16].

More women than men work in vulnerable, low-paid, or undervalued jobs [20]. As of 2013, 49.1 per cent of the world's working women were in vulnerable employment, often unprotected by labour legislation, compared to 46.9 per cent of men. Women were far more likely than men to be in vulnerable employment in East Asia (50.3 per cent versus 42.3 per cent), South-East Asia and the Pacific (63.1 per cent versus 56 per cent), South Asia (80.9 per cent versus 74.4 per cent), North Africa (54.7 per cent versus 30.2 per cent), the Middle East (33.2 per cent versus 23.7 per cent) and Sub-Saharan Africa (nearly 85.5 per cent versus 70.5 per cent) [21].

Women's economic equality is good for business. Companies greatly benefit from increasing leadership opportunities for women, which is shown to increase organizational effectiveness. It is estimated that companies with three or more women in senior management functions score higher in all dimensions of organizational effectiveness [25].

Ethnicity and gender interact to create especially large pay gaps for minority women. In 2013 in the US for instance, "women of all major racial and ethnic groups earn less than men of the same group, and also earn less than white men...Hispanic women's median earnings were USD 541 per week of full-time work, only 61.2 per cent of white men's median weekly earnings, but 91.1 per cent of the median weekly earnings of Hispanic men (because Hispanic men also have low earnings). The median weekly earnings of black women were USD 606, only 68.6 per cent of white men's earnings, but 91.3 per cent of black men's median weekly earnings, which are also fairly low. Earnings for a full-time week of work leave Hispanic women well below, and Hispanic men and black women not much above, the qualifying income threshold for receipt of food stamps of USD 588.75 for a family of four" [26].

Essential to agriculture

Women comprise an average of 43 per cent of the agricultural labour force in developing countries, varying considerably across regions from 20 per cent or less in Latin America to 50 per cent or more in parts of Asia and Africa [27]. Despite the regional and sub-regional variation, women make an essential contribution to agriculture across the developing world.

Women are responsible for household food preparation in 85-90 per cent of cases surveyed in a wide range of countries [31].

The green economy, sustainable development

From 1990 to 2010, more than 2 billion people gained access to safe drinking water, but 748 million people are still without clean drinking water [32].

Women, especially those in poverty, appear more vulnerable in the face of natural disasters. A recent study of 141 countries found that more women than men die from natural hazards. Where the socioeconomic status of women is high, men and women die in roughly equal numbers during and after natural disasters, whereas more women than men die (or die at a younger age) where the socioeconomic status of women is low. Women and children are more likely to die than men during disasters [33].

Notes

[1] Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Gender Equality in Education, Employment and Entrepreneurship: Final Report to the MCM 2012. http://www.oecd.org/employment/50423364.pdf. p. 17. See also, Klasen, S. and Lamanna, F. (2009), "The impact of gender inequality in education and employment on economic growth: New evidence for a panel of countries," Feminist Economics, 15: 3, pp. 91-132 (as retrieved from UN Women, Progress of the World's Women 2015-2016: Transforming economies, realizing rights Chapter 4, p. 199).

[2] The World Bank, 2012, World Development Report: Gender Equality and Development, p. 5.

[3] OECD, Gender Equality in Education, Employment and Entrepreneurship: Final Report to the MCM 2012. http://www.oecd.org/employment/50423364.pdf p. 3.

[4] OECD, Gender Equality in Education, Employment and Entrepreneurship: Final Report to the MCM 2012. http://www.oecd.org/employment/50423364.pdf p. 19.

[5] UN Women, Progress of the World's Women 2015-2016. Chapter 2, p. 69.

[6] E. Gakidou, et al., 2010, "Increased Educational Attainment and its Effect on Child Mortality in 175 Countries between 1970 and 2009: A Systematic Analysis," The Lancet, 376(9745), p. 969.

[7] World Bank Findex, Financial Inclusion Data. http://datatopics.worldbank.org/financialinclusion/topic/gender

[8] International Labour Organization (2014). Global Employment Trends 2014: Risk of a jobless recovery? p. 19. Accessed here on 23 January, 2015: http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/---publ/documents/publication/wcms_233953.pdf

[9] World Bank Gender Data Portal. http://datatopics.worldbank.org/gender/key%20gender%20employment%20indicators

[10] World Bank, World Development Report 2012, p. 79.

[11] International Labour Organization (2014). Global Employment Trends 2014: Risk of a jobless recovery? p. 45. http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/---publ/documents/publication/wcms_233953.pdf

[12] Actionaid, 2015, "Close the Gap! The cost of inequality in women's work," p. 9. http://www.actionaid.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/womens_rights_on-line_version_2.1.pdf

[13] World Bank, World Development Report 2012. p. 80.

[14] EuroStat. 2014 (as retrieved from UN Women, Progress of the World's Women 2015-2016. Chapter 2, p. 84.)

[15] Ibid. See also Report on Unpaid Care Work by the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty.

[16] OECD Gender Data. http://www.oecd.org/gender/data/balancingpaidworkunpaidworkandleisure.htm

[17] UN Women, Progress of the World's Women 2015-2016. Chapter 2, p. 71.

[18] Ibid. ch.2, p.43 (orginal source: Table 1 in Vanek et al. (2014))

[19] Fontana & Paciello, 2010. Other forms of non-agricultural employment for example in trade activities or small enterprises constitute only a small fraction of total employment in rural areas (as retrieved from UN Women, forthcoming, Progress of the World's Women 2015-2016. Chapter 2, p. ).

[20] ILO, Global Employment Trends for Women, 2012, p. 8 and 22. http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/documents/publication/wcms_195447.pdf. See Also, The World Bank, Gender at Work: A Companion to the World Development Report on Jobs. http://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/document/Gender/GenderAtWork_web.pdf

[21] ILO, Global Employment Trends, 2014. Table A12, p. 99. http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/---publ/documents/publication/wcms_233953.pdf

[22] World Bank 2014. Women, Business and Law 2014: Removing Restrictions to Enhance Gender Equality. p. 8 http://wbl.worldbank.org/~/media/FPDKM/WBL/Documents/Reports/2014/Women-Business-and-the-Law-2014-Key-Findings.pdf

[25] McKinsey & Company. Women Matter 2014. p. 6

[26] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Median usual weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers by selected characteristics, annual averages http://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t07.htm as retrieved from "The Gender Wage Gap: 2013; Differences by Race and Ethnicity, No Growth in Real Wages for Women," by Ariane Hegewisch, Claudia Williams, Heidi Hartmann, Ph.D., Stephanie Keller Hudiburg (March 2014). Fact Sheet, p. 2. http://www.iwpr.org/publications/pubs/the-gender-wage-gap-2013-differences-by-race-and-ethnicity-no-growth-in-real-wages-for-women

[27] FAO, 2014 State of Food and Agriculture. http://www.fao.org/3/a-i4040e.pdf . p. 35.

[28] Food and Agriculture Organization, The State of Food and Agriculture 2011: Women and Agriculture, Closing the Gender Gap for Development. Note that although global data is limited, there is evidence that supports this claim.

[30]World Bank, World Development Report 2012. p. 3

[31] World Health Organization and United Nations Children's Fund, 2014, " Update: Progress on Sanitation and Drinking Water," p. 8-9. http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2010/9789241563956_eng_full_text.pdf?ua=1

[32] World Health Organization and United Nations Children's Fund, 2014, " Update: Progress on Sanitation and Drinking Water," p. 8-9. http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2010/9789241563956_eng_full_text.pdf?ua=1

[33] Neumeyer, E and T. Plumper (2007) "The Gendered Nature of Natural Disasters: The Impact of Catastrophic Events on the Gender Gap in Life Expectancy, 1981-2002", Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 97(3): 551 http://www.lse.ac.uk/geographyAndEnvironment/whosWho/profiles/neumayer/pdf/Article%20in%20Annals%20%28natural%20disasters%29.pdf. See also, World Health Organization, "Gender, Climate Change, and Health" (Geneva, 2011); Gender equality and the empowerment of women in natural disasters Report of the Secretary-General (E/CN.6/2014/13) p. 3. http://www.who.int/globalchange/GenderClimateChangeHealthfinal.pdf

[34] World Bank, Household Cookstoves, Environment, Health and Climate Change (Washington, D.C., 2011).

[35] World Health Organization and United Nations Children's Fund, Progress on Drinking Water and Sanitation: 2012 Update, (Geneva, 2012).

[36] United Nations publication, 2010. The World's Women 2010: Trends and Statistics.

[Page updated July 2017.]

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When more women work, economies grow. If women's paid employment rates were raised to the same level as men's, the United States' gross domestic product would be an estimated 9 per cent higher, the Euro-zone's would climb by 13 per cent, and Japan's would be boosted by 16 per cent.

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Progress of the World's Women 2015-2016 | Chapter 2

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Women's labour force participation has stagnated over the past 25 years. Gender gaps are wide and persistent: three quarters of men are in the labour force, compared to only half of women. Differences in women's employment opportunities, gender pay gaps, and less access to social protection results in large lifetime income gaps.

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A UN Women initiative to bring awareness to the gender pay gap. Globally, women still make 23% less than men. #stoptherobbery