By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 14 2004 (IPS)

”Breaking with the traditional logic of the State, which treats women as a family appendage” is the ambition that moves Brazil’s special secretary of policies for women, Nilcea Freire, who is leading a national conference in Brasilia this week.

The Thursday-Sunday event in the capital will be the first time a Brazilian government has convened such a broad, participative conference to design policies aimed at promoting equality between women and men, the secretary, who has the rank of a cabinet minister, told IPS.

Since January, more than 100,000 women have participated in meetings in 2,000 municipalities distributed in all of Brazil’s 27 states, approving some 3,000 specific proposals and electing the 2,000 delegates who will represent them at this week’s national conference.

The women who will lead the process of implementing Brazil’s first National Plan of Policies for Women are to emerge from the process.

The aim is to leave behind the ”welfare” attitude that sees women ”only as mothers or wives”, in order to make them ”subjects of law” in policies in all areas that will generate the conditions for true equality, said Freire.

”Broadening women’s autonomy,” especially with respect to economic questions, is key, she underlined. That would mean equal access to credit, property and jobs, with women earning the same wages as men, as Brazil’s legislation already stipulates.

Only recently have women begun to be granted property titles and financing in their own name when poor rural families are settled on small plots of land as part of Brazil’s agrarian reform programme.

Further, women employees earn, on average, 35 percent less than men in Brazil.

”There must be enforcement of the law that promises equality but which is evaded by means of a number of loopholes and tricks, thus blocking equality of opportunity,” said the official.

According to a study cited by Freire, women hold a mere nine percent of managerial and executive posts in Brazil’s 500 largest companies.

The under-representation of women in upper-level positions and the wage gap persist despite the fact that women comprise a majority of university students and tend to have a higher educational level.

Economic autonomy and the reduction of poverty are essential for enabling women to confront problems like domestic violence, discrimination and other questions to be discussed at the conference, said Freire.

The 3,000 proposals approved by the plenary municipal and state meetings were classified in five broad areas: the fight against poverty; the fight against violence; the welfare and well-being of women; access to power; and culture, or ”knowledge for equality”.

The women’s rights movement, which organised its own national conference two years ago, without participation by the government, is now taking part in the government initiative, with ”great hopes” that the promised changes will become reality, Eliana Magalhaes Graça, the Feminist Centre of Studies and Advice (CFEMEA) parliamentary adviser, remarked to IPS.

Not only are public policies aimed at expanding the representation of women in political posts, fighting inequality, and guaranteeing sexual and reproductive rights needed, but ”we also want the state to have the conditions for implementing” and enforcing the policies, she said.

Decision-making regarding the government budget should also be open to participation, monitoring and oversight by social movements, in order to ensure that the policies are effectively implemented, said the activist.

She acknowledged that the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former trade unionist, is more open to participation by civil society than its predecessors. Several councils have been created, for example, and national conferences have been organised around different issues, like the environment, human rights, and food security.

But the resources for implementing policies must be guaranteed, which means a ”participative budget”, like the system used in many towns and cities governed by Lula’s leftist Workers Party (PT), is ”essential”, said Graça.

Participation in budgetary decisions also requires more transparent information on public accounts, the activist argued.

Another demand voiced by women is that all policies and social programmes should be evaluated and implemented from a ”gender perspective”, to verify whether they actually improve the conditions faced by women, who comprise a majority of the poor in this country of nearly 180 million, and whose situation has repercussions on the entire family.

Women are already the heads of 26 percent of households in Latin America’s biggest country – a proportion that rises to over one-third in urban areas, according to official statistics.

Policies aimed at generating employment, creating more training programmes and improving wages for women, as well as reforms of the country’s labour laws to improve the conditions faced by women are essential for achieving equal opportunities, said Maria Betania Avila, head of the women’s group SOS Corpo.

This week’s conference will mark ”an important moment” in terms of progress in the struggle for women’s rights, she added.

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