Time to rise up against gender inequality

International Women's Day was celebrated around the world on Mar. 8 against a backdrop of grim statistics clearly demonstrating that gender equality is a long way off. Women still account for 70 percent of people living in poverty, are paid 20-30 percent less than men, and are increasingly victims of HIV/AIDS. "We are going to have to rise up as a mass and demand our rights, because they are clearly not being given to us," Ingrid Charles Gumbs, director of gender affairs for St. Kitts and Nevis, told IPS. "There must be a greater awakening among women to the fact that we have issues that must be addressed." The need for gender equality and women's empowerment has been recognized at both the national and international levels. Governments worldwide have committed to documents such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination (CEDAW) and the Beijing Platform for Action adopted at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995. Gender equality also features prominently in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), an ambitious set of poverty-alleviation targets to which 189 UN member states have committed. But to this day, "The institutional arrangements, increased resources and strengthened operational mechanisms, essential to assist countries opening up for women to become equal players, have not been made," Noeleen Heyzer, executive director of the United Nations Development Fund for Women, said as the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) met for its fiftieth session, which will end Mar. 10. Women all over the world, particularly in developing countries, continue to fall short in the huge gap between policy and practice. Women are about 70 percent of the 1.3 billion people living on less than one dollar per day. According to UN figures, millions of female workers have been pushed into insecure work in the informal economy, and women are still paid on average 20 to 30 percent less than men in both industrialized and developing economies. "Rates of HIV/AIDS have been seen rising especially among young women," according to the World Health Organization, which notes that last year, 4.9 million people were newly infected. Women are also underrepresented through all levels of government, and hold only 16 percent of parliamentary seats worldwide. A UN report to the CSW also recognizes that the progress of women in areas such as business, academia, civil society, the media and the judiciary, has been even slower than women's progress in parliaments.