The CSW trade union delegation.

Selina Rust interviews GEMMA ADABA of the International Trade Union Confederation

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 12 (IPS/TerraViva) Thirty women union delegates representing a million working women in their membership came to the CSW here to advocate on behalf of women’s rights at work around the globe.

TerraViva correspondent Selina Rust spoke to Gemma Adaba from the ITUC about the progress of women’s rights in the workplace.

TV: While working women have made significant progress in getting decision-making jobs in the industrial world, they are still lagging far behind men in the developing world. How wide is this gap, and how could it be rectified?

GA: It varies a lot from country to country. Even in the developed world, women feel that there is still progress that needs to be made. In governments as well as in the public services and in the private sector, we have to work very proactively on affirmative action in the professional life and put it equally in decision-making.

The developing countries have not really instituted systems of affirmative action but they have made progress. So many developing countries have begun to look at procedural instruments they can use to advance gender equality in decision-making.

TV: How successful are trade unions in protecting the rights of women in the workplace? Are there still any major institutional barriers to overcome?

GA: In pretty much all countries we still have basic structure discrimination. Whereas men are situated manly in the productive sector, women work in both the productive and the reproductive sectors. Basically, you would find that men have all the time that they need to focus on advancing professionally in the world of work. But women have to combine those concerns about advancing in the world of work with all of the concerns of caring for their children and other family members. And of course, that takes away a lot of their time. It is also unpaid work.

TV: Many countries offer paid parental leave for the husband and/or the wife to care for their children at infancy: a privilege mostly practiced in Scandinavian countries. Will this trend ever catch up with the rest of the world?

GA: We certainly hope it would catch up. With the trade union movement we have been promoting the ILO convention 156, which is the convention dealing with equal responsibilities between women and men in terms of family care. This convention sets out the whole framework, and it is necessary for countries to ratify this convention, to incorporate it into their legislation and then implement it.

We think that there will be progress. We have been doing a lot of work in that area, like sensitising people and governments about pay inequity, gaps and structure discriminations.

TV: What has changed in terms of women’s rights at work since Beijing 15 years ago?

GA: I think this is manly about awareness of structure discrimination against women. I think a lot of analysis has been done which actually demonstrates that policies are not gender neutral. We have to incorporate gender equality objectives in order to advance gender equality. This message now is catching on among men who oftentimes are the decision makers. I think this awareness-raising and consciousness-raising is something that has been advanced.

TV: Have working women benefited from the current two-week session of the Commission on the Status of Women?

GA: We faced major challenges and obstacles to engage within the U.N. during this two-week session.  Lots of people came to this meeting with great expectations and the U.N. was just not equipped with the necessary physical structure to receive all these people. Due to the renovations, we had a lot of access restrictions, which means that we have not been able to engage as meaningfully as we could have.

But within the trade union movement we have been following in particular the resolution on the economic empowerment of women. We have tried to put in some amendments that focus on the issues of women’s rights and women’s rights at work, like the right for collective bargaining, and the right to access to resources, education, training, health as well as credit.

TV: In which sectors has gender equality been largely achieved and in which are there still barriers to overcome?

GA: In the teaching and health sector for example, we do have a majority of women. But in highly professional fields, like doctors and engineers, we still have to bridge the equality gap between men and women.

The segregated sectors, like the mining sector, the car-making industry, machinery and the transport sector, are still dominated by men. But there are women’s committees that are trying to find ways to advance women in sectors that have been traditionally segregated in favour of men.

Women informal cross-border traders negotiate a minefield ranging from bus drivers, customs officials and dangerous and unfamiliar environments. Credit: IPS

By Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 10 (IPS/TerraViva) Whenever gender empowerment is a vibrant topic of discussion internationally, some of the countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America are invariably singled out for their success stories in politics, education, health care or civil liberties even as Africa is mostly left out of political reckoning – and wrongly so.

Rwanda has provided global leadership in terms of women holding elected office, with more than half of all its parliamentary seats filled by women, says Litha Musyimi-Ogana, director of women, gender and development directorate at the 53-member African Union (AU), the largest single coalition of African nations.

Cape Verde, another African high achiever, has “had the highest level of cabinet ministers in the world:” at last count, about 12 out of 17.

But still, Musyimi-Ogana points out, the AU is aware that although 70 percent of its members have gender policies, there are “huge implementation challenges”.

The reason why most of these policies are not implemented is primarily lack of financial resources.

As a result, the AU has set up an African Women’s Development Fund to tide over “resource constraints”.

At the same time, it has also established a protocol – an addendum on the ‘Rights of Women’ ratified by 27 countries – to the existing African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights.

Lalla Ben Barka, deputy executive secretary of the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), claims Africa has made “impressive gains” in closing the gender gap in primary education, largely due “to free, universal, compulsory education” – continent-wide.

She told the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), which concludes a two-week session Friday, that 65 percent of the region’s countries were conducting research on the situation of girls, and some countries had revised school curricula to present positive images of women.

Still, there were gaps in several areas: inheritance rights for women, higher education and the elimination of cultural practices and barriers to women’s advancement.

She said Liberia has had the distinction of having elected the first female African president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who took office in January 2006.

Ben Barka also said that 47 percent of countries had enacted laws to combat female genital mutilation (FGM), and many offered comprehensive services for victims.

According to Tsegga Gaim Misgun of the National Union of Eritrean Women, efforts to abolish FGM began as far back as the late 1970s  – even before the formal independence of Eritrea in 1993 – by the then de facto government, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front.

As a result of these efforts, the people of Eritrea had initiated community laws banning FGM. On the basis of these initiatives, the government of Eritrea banned the practice in March 2007.

“The proclamation made female genital mutilation a criminal offence,” Misgun said.

Noluthando Mayende-Sibiya, South Africa’s minister for women, children and persons with disabilities, told delegates that although violence against women and girls remains a “major concern of government”, the country is in an advanced stage of developing a comprehensive framework to address gender violence.

These include, among others, legislation on sexual offences; trafficking in persons; domestic violence; and the children’s act.

The Thuthuzela Care Centre, described as a comprehensive one-stop service centre for victims of domestic violence, was hailed as an example of “best practice” in the 2007 report by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on violence against children.

“These are replicated and piloted in some countries at the global level,” she said.

Mayende-Sibiya also said that South Africa was proud of the high number of women deployed in peacekeeping missions, averaging about 40 percent of peacekeepers from her country.

Alphonsine Mbie N’na, Gabon’s minister of health and social affairs, said her country had created a poverty reduction strategy as well as an exam to promote socio-economic activities among women, with winners receiving 40,000 dollars and an overseas trip.

 In the field of employment, Gabon has no hiring or salary discrimination. Schooling and text books were free.

In Ethiopia, the ministry of women’s affairs was an integral part of the executive branch of the government.

And to boost gender equality in agriculture – the country’s main economic sector – Ethiopia registers names of spouses for land certification in order to ensure that women can own their economic assets.

Georg Kell, executive director of the UN Global Compact, speaks about the launch of the Women's Empowerment Principles. Credit: Bomoon Lee/TerraViva

By Sabina Zaccaro

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 9 (IPS/TerraViva) Companies with women in leadership positions are reporting a measurable boost to their bottom lines, but they are still a minority in the world’s business community.

To rectify this imbalance, the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and the U.N. Global Compact (UNGC) have designed specific guidelines to encourage the business community to appoint more women as managers, executives and board members.

“The full participation of women benefits business and, indeed, all of us,” Georg Kell, executive director of the U.N. Global Compact, told TerraViva.

The call for action is part of the Women’s Empowerment Principles – Equality Means Business, seven steps companies can take to empower women in the workplace and address the vast under-representation of women in top positions and on boards.

Principle number one urges company executives to make gender equality a top priority.

The seven principles are informed by leading businesses’ policies and practices from different sectors and around the world, Kell said, and offer a practical approach to advance women. He said the UNGC objective is to integrate these principles into companies’ own corporate social responsibility programmes.

A recent survey by the consultancy firm McKinsey reports that one-third of 2,300 monitored companies said their investments in women had already resulted in greater profits, while another third said their investments would soon show profit.

“The multiplier effect of women’s empowerment has been increasingly acknowledged,” said Inés Alberdi, UNIFEM’s executive director. “What is powerful and new today is that the corporate community itself reports that gender equality is good for business — advancing innovation, attracting top talent, raising positive consumer and community recognition and improving profits.”

Copel is a power utility in southern Brazil that generates and delivers accessible electricity to the entire population of the state of Paraná – more than three million connected households. Its total workforce is around 8,000 direct workers and 5,000 outsourced employees.

“We signed the Global Compact in 2001 and since then we have been trying hard to understand and incorporate its principles, as the corporate pace allows us to,” said Susie C. Pontarolli of the Environment and Corporate Citizenship Division at Copel.

The division she works for is also run by a woman, Marlene Zannin, the only woman appointed to a leadership position since the company was founded in 1954.

“Having a woman as Director of Environment and Corporate Citizenship speaks a lot and loud about how much progress has been made in our corporate culture since we committed to the Global Compact,” Pontarolli said.

“This is something we could have never dreamed of back in 1999, when we got started with the first steps towards corporate social responsibility,” she added.

The women’s empowerment principles were developed over a one-year international consultation process to help companies tailor existing policies and practices to advance women’s empowerment and inclusion.

They also address factors that have an indirect impact on businesses, like violence against women in the workplace. Principle three, in fact, includes establishing a zero-tolerance policy towards all forms of violence at work and training security staff and managers to recognise signs of violence against women.

The complete list of Principles can be found here: http://www.unifem.org/attachments/stories/WomensEmpowermentPrinciples.pdf

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