New York, October 21 – The United Nations has admitted that a much celebrated program adopted 25 years ago to bring working-age women into the labor market worldwide has failed as less than 50 per cent of them currently have jobs while underpaid women health workers are fighting the pandemic at the forefronts and countless others are doing long hours in unpaid domestic work. “Twenty-five years since the adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, progress towards equal power and equal rights for women remains elusive,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a new report on the state of gender equality worldwide. “No country has achieved gender equality, and the Covid-19 crisis threatens to erode the limited gains that have been made. The Decade of Action to deliver the Sustainable Development Goals and efforts to recover better from the pandemic offer a chance to transform the lives of women and girls, today and tomorrow.” The full report with all data: bit.ly/worldswomen2020 , entitled The World’s Women 2020: Trends and Statistics, analyses gender equality in six critical areas: (1) population and families; (2) health; (3) education; (4) economic empowerment and asset ownership; (5) power and decision-making; (6) and violence against women and the girl child as well as the impact of Covid-19. It said unpaid domestic and care work falls disproportionately on women, restraining their economic potential as the Covid-19 pandemic additionally affects women’s jobs and livelihoods. The report said globally on an average day women spend about three times as many hours on unpaid domestic and care work as men (4.2 hours compared to 1.7 hours). In Northern Africa and Western Asia that gender gap is even higher, with women spending more than seven times as much as men on these activities. In 2020, only 47 per cent of women of working age participated in the labor market, compared to 74 per cent of men, which is a gender gap that has remained relatively constant since 1995. In Southern Asia, Northern Africa and Western Asia, the number is even lower, with less than 30% of women participating in the labor market. Among the high levels of power and decision making personnel, women held only 28 per cent of managerial positions globally in 2019 – almost the same proportion as in 1995. And only 18 per cent of enterprises surveyed had a female Chief Executive Officer in 2020. Among Fortune 500 corporations, only 7.4 per cent, or 37 Chief Executive Officers, were women. In political life, while women’s representation in parliament has more than doubled globally, it has still not crossed the barrier of 25 per cent of parliamentary seats in 2020. Women’s representation among cabinet ministers has quadrupled over the last 25 years, yet remains well below parity at 22 per cent. |
UN: Program promoting gender equality in the workforce failed after 25 years
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