Abstract
Progress of the World’s Women 2015-2016: Transforming economies, realizing rights’, comprises a comprehensive set of interesting ideas and very useful information, whether one is seeking to understand, research, critically analyse or intervene in the issue of gender inequality in today’s society.
It constitutes a text that is both inspiring and challenging. It is inspiring because, in its interpretive framework, it incorporates many contributions from feminist studies and international human rights treaties and standards. Through the concept of ‘substantive equality’, the document states that, besides the legal conquests that guarantee formal equality between men and women, gender equality requires dismantling the structural barriers and discriminatory norms underpinning gender inequality.
It is also a great advance to see the affirmation that gender equality has intrinsic value in itself, a human rights obligation that remains vastly unfulfilled. But, it is also discouraging that, for policy-makers, this ideal is still not sufficiently convincing. The defence of gender equality has to be founded on an instrumental argument. Thus, it constitutes a ‘development imperative: the growing inequalities between social groups, and between rich and poor women, undermine development by wasting human capabilities and talents, hindering economic dynamism and threatening social cohesion’ (p. 234). The report oscillates between these two judgments. At times, the commitment to social and gender equality policies is encoded as a moral duty, and, at others, regarded as a form of investment in human potential that brings ‘long-term returns’.
The report is challenging in terms of the magnitude and complexity of the changes necessary to achieve ‘substantive equality’: it ‘requires fundamental transformation of economic and social institutions at every level of society’ (p. 56).
In order to obtain ‘substantive equality’, the report recommends that economic and social policies to promote gender equality work in tandem. This means that social policies must cease to be a form of compensation for the undesirable effects of macro-economic policies. On the contrary, it is proposed that macroeconomic policies themselves be formulated with gender equality and social justice as goals.
The report is welcome, above all, in developing countries, as it states that, in order to redress women’s socioeconomic disadvantages, it is necessary to have employment policies, social protection and social services of a universal nature. This is particularly welcome in countries that have adopted policies to combat poverty, such as the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programmes and transformed them into a panacea for reducing poverty. In many countries, such as Brazil, although they have contributed to a reduction in extreme poverty, these policies have not been accompanied by a significant expansion in indispensable public services, such as education, health, occupational training, security and housing, needed to reduce poverty and gender inequalities (Lavinas, 2013).
Another notable contribution of the report is the notion that remunerated work only becomes a fundamental pillar for substantive equality of women when unpaid domestic and care work are shared between men and women; when women are allowed some time for leisure and learning; when sufficient income is provided for them to maintain an adequate standard of living and when women in the workplace are treated with dignity. In fact, the persistence of the disadvantages women face in the labour market occurs, to a great extent, because unpaid care and domestic work remain a huge constraint on women’s capacity to engage in paid work. In many countries, when paid and unpaid work are combined, women’s overall work load is greater than that of men. The report suggests that, to correct this inequality, changes are necessary in the way both remunerated and unpaid care/domestic work are organized. Regarding the latter, the report is more detailed and recommends a set of policies that would reduce and redistribute unpaid domestic and care work, such as investments in infrastructure and services, broader access to crèches and longer maternity, paternity and parental leave, including for informal workers, among others. However, the report does not develop a more fundamental rethinking of the organization of the employment market, beyond the vague affirmation that ‘as long as labour markets continue to operate based on expectations of uninterrupted, life-long, full-time employment, those who carry out the bulk of unpaid care and domestic work will inevitably be penalized’ (UN Women, 2015: 73). The world of work has been undergoing great transformations. The shift from a Fordist/Taylorist production system to one of flexible accumulation has contributed to the growth of subcontracted work, self-employment, and temporary and part-time work contracts, particularly for women. The report does not advance concrete proposals for desirable reforms in the organization of the labour market from the point of view of gender equality.
Another notable absence is attention to urban mobility problems, in other words the ability to move from one place to another within cities, above all, to commute to work, as a significant dimension of the decent work agenda. This is a problem that is set to get worse: In fact, the projections for 2030 indicate that the majority (60%) of the world’s population will be urban and there will be a great increase in those resident in megacities (The Economist, 2015). The main concentration of jobs is generally in central urban areas, whereas the respective workers are for the most part concentrated on the periphery, resulting in many hours of commuting. In this urban configuration, women, especially those responsible for reproductive work in the family, are particularly penalized, as their employment options are more limited. Indeed, some urban social movements in Brazil are claiming that the time spent commuting should be counted as productive work that is unpaid (Passa Palavra, 2014).
Another theme that deserves more attention is the process of commercialization and globalization of care work and its relationship with human rights. This is creating an expanding source of employment, responding to increasing life expectancy, and contributing to new migratory flows. These migratory flows include a larger female contingent, employment is becoming more precarious and there are increasing inequalities among women of different social classes, races/ethnicities and nationalities (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2002). The challenge of ensuring these workers can access decent work are immense, and these are well formulated by Fudge (2013) as the need
to expand labour law’s scale so that it is no longer unquestionably identified with the territory of the nation state. The partial de-territorialisation, the recognition that labour law operates beyond the boundaries of the nation state, challenges feminists, and other labour law scholars, to develop normative foundations for labour law that are not confined to narrow conceptions of national citizenship. (p. 1)
The weakest point of the report is the accounts of experiences called ‘stories of change’. This literary style, so common in UN and non-governmental organisation (NGO) documents, clashes markedly with the content of this report, which emphasizes far-reaching structural processes and changes. Such ‘stories of change’ are defined by the particular history of each society. They bear an intrinsic connection with the political, social and cultural universe peculiar to a certain reality. No isolated experience can be transported mechanically from one context to another. The cases dealt with describe situations that are apparently successful, but could hardly be generalized to apply to other regional realities.
Finally, the report presents a large amount of statistics and data, which can be used to evaluate the gender impacts of the various social and economic policies. The conclusion is that, for women, much has advanced since the 1980s, following the proclamation of United Nations Decade for Women: Equality, Development and Peace (1976–1985). But the report recognizes that there are still large gaps in data on important aspects of gender inequality, and information about developing countries remains limited. Certainly, one of the great contributions of this report is that of stimulating countries to perfect their statistical systems to generate clear evidence of gender gaps that may help lead to improvements in their respective societies.
The principal merit of the report, Progress of the World’s Women 2015-2016: Transforming economies, realizing rights is the elaboration of an interpretive framework that shows that macroeconomic policies must be an instrument to promote gender and social justice. This is the main lesson that feminist economists have taught us.