RIGHTS: Women Review Progress in Gender Equality

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

MEXICO CITY, Oct 9 1999 (IPS) - Women’s groups around the world are taking stock of their progress in securing gender equality – agreed on at the 1995 World Conference on Women held in Beijing.

Their review will be presented at a special session of the United Nations to be held in New York next June. That gathering, which has been labelled “Beijing Plus-5” will have as its theme “Women 2000: Gender, Equality, Development and Peace for the 21st Century.”

At a preliminary conference in the Caribbean this week, government ministers and officials responsible for women’s affairs placed special emphasis on what had been advocated at the Beijing meeting and what had been achieved since then.

“The period since the (Beijing) conference has been a time of progress, but also one of setbacks, instability and lost opportunities,” said Joycelin Massiah, the regional programme advisor to the United Nations Development Fund for Women, in remarks to the Third Caribbean Ministerial Conference on Women.

In Asia, women’s groups have launched a radio campaign to drive home the message from Beijing.

“We are making use of the airwaves to call on our governments to honour the commitments they made,” said Lorna Israel, information coordinator for the “Platform For Action” at the Beijing Plus-5 gathering.

News dispatches featuring women’s issues were being broadcast twice monthly to keep people in the region informed of the on- going review, she added.

At the heart of the review lay the expectations women had of the Beijing Platform For Action (BPFA), the final document that emerged from the Sept. 1995 gathering in China, which was signed by 189 countries.

The document highlighted 12 areas of critical concern that mattered to the thousands of women who attended the conference.

Such concerns as: achieving equality between women and men in human rights; the increasing burden of poverty on women; inequality in education and training; inequality in access to health care; violence against women; inequality between men and women in power-sharing and decision making, and violations of the rights of girls.

So what global picture did women expect to see next June?

Opinions have varied but “there is little to show…” has been the most repeated phrase heard at preliminary gatherings prior to “Beijing Plus-5.”

In Africa, for instance, “Women are standing where they were in 1995,” Anne Murago of the International Federation of Women Lawyers told IPS.

In Kenya, she said, the process of implementing the BPFA resolutions had stagnated and the period between 1995 and 1999 saw women participating the least in decision-making. Women were the first group affected by increased poverty in, she added.

Furthermore, it was common for a Kenyan man, who broke his wife’s jaw or limbs in a domestic argument, to be sentenced to six months in jail with the option of a 5,000-shilling fine, a much lower sentence than what he would receive had he assaulted a man.

“This is clearly dehumanising women. It sends out the message that women’s lives and physical integrity are not valued in the same way as those of men,” observed Murago

In the Asia-Pacific region, similar conclusions were reached at a conference in Thailand in early September, attended by 500 women from non-governmental organisations in the area. Speaker after speaker referred to the continuing discrimination against in the region.

The conference’s final statement, submitted for the June review, made note of the number of women being denied access to adequate health; that there was a lack of gender-sensitive education; that women were still the victims of violence and that the girl-child continued to be exploited.

In the Central-Asian nation of Azerbaijan, however, women have secured some progress toward gaining equal rights. According to a paper presented by Elmira Suleymanov, the president of the Azerbaijan Women and Development Centre, “Some positive changes in the status of women in Central Asia have been reached.”

Such gains include the adoption and implementation of the national plan of action based on the BPFA at the governmental and community level, creation of new institutional mechanisms and machineries, and the total literacy and equal access to education.

Nevertheless, there remained aspects of life where women continued to be at a disadvantage, Suleymanov said. This particularly applied to female participation in governance and decision making, the number of women living in poverty and those who were unemployed.

The June Beijing Plus-5 gathering will focus on five broad themes which, the organisers declared, would absorb the 12 critical areas of concern identified in the BPFA document.

They hope that participarting governments will take heed of what more must be done to ensure the empowerment of women. This included:

– Government implementation of legal reforms that would end existing discrimination towards women.

– To work toward women’s advancement and gender mainstreaming.

– To be more accountable to the BPFA’s concern for gender disaggregated data and budgetary allocations for women, and

– To assist the girl child who continued to be a victim of society.

Some women, however, have their doubts about any dramatic outcome of the June conference.

They pointed to the review held in 1990, five years after the Third World Conference on Women – held in Nairobi, Kenya – where the “Nairobi Forward Looking Strategy” was adopted.

Implementation of that strategy had been very slow, they said.