An Extended Commentary of the UN Women’s 2015 Flagship Report

By Aramide Odutayo - 02 February 2016

Aramide Odutayo examines the strengths and limitations of the UN Women’s flagship report “Progress of the World’s Women 2015-2016: Transforming Economies, Realizing Rights”.

The UN Women’s (UNW) flagship report “Progress of the World’s Women 2015-2016: Transforming Economies, Realizing Rights” (hereafter referred to as Progress or UNW report), successfully elucidates the necessary policies needed to ensure that economies work for all women and that human rights are realized. Progress: a) recognizes privilege, oppression, and intersectionality; b) appreciates the difference between formal and substantive equality; and c) is cognizant of the gender biases that are inherent in macro-economic policy agendas that define contemporary globalization. Unfortunately, the report also falls short in its understanding of what radical transformative change truly entails. By failing to engage seriously with other actors beyond the state and indigenous feminist critiques of the state, the Progress Report is not entirely successful in outlining a comprehensive plan for creating a more equal and just society for all women.

I was pleased to observe that the Progress report recognized intersectionality. Intersectionality is a feminist theory, methodology of research, and catalyst for a social justice agenda. Its basic premise is that “people live multiple, layered identities derived from social relations, history, and the operations of structures of power. People are members of more than one community at the same time, and can simultaneously experience oppression and privilege”.

UNW appreciation of the different types of privilege and discrimination that occur as a consequence of an individual’s particular combination of identities is significant, coming as it does from the annual flagship publication of a major UN agency. There are several compelling examples of UNW awareness that the term “women” is not a monolith, and that combining different identities produces substantively different experiences for each individual woman. For instance, in emphasizing the need to move the world towards a universal protection floor, the report also notes that social protections and services are sometimes delivered in a way that stereotype and stigmatize various categories of women, particularly those who are poor, disabled, indigenous, or members of ethnic and racial minorities. More importantly, the report does not just give lip service to the discrimination experienced by women who stand at the intersection of multiple sites of oppression, instead urging governments to give special attention to the constraints faced by indigenous women, rural women, differently-abled women, and minority, racialized or migrant women as they face multiple challenges to realizing their rights.

Third, the Progress report appreciates the difference between formal and substantive equality. To illustrate their commitment to substantive equality, UNW titled the opening chapter “Substantive Equality for Women: The Challenge for Public Policy”. Furthermore, UNW also situates their commitment to substantive equality, as opposed to mere formal equality, in both the international human rights system as well as the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The message of substantive equality – and the positioning of substantive equality within human rights frameworks - is a welcome sight in the Progress report for a variety of reasons.

First the marriage of substantive equality and human rights discourse could be a subtle acknowledgement of bottom-up governance and the ‘new-rights agenda’. The ‘new-rights agenda’ illustrates the growing centrality of rights in debates about global social policy. As conceptualized in international law, human rights are global because they draw on the international human rights regime overseen by the UN. The ‘new rights agenda’ calls for a re-reading of international structures in a manner that stresses that human entitlements are embedded within international agreements. Such is the case with the notion of substantive gender equality advanced in Article 1 of CEDAW. Even though these agreements are often either ignored or not implemented around the world, bottom-up governance demands that these rights and entitlements be taken seriously.

The report’s focus on substantive equality also allows UNW to demand “fundamental transformations of social and economic institutions at every level of society”. For example, the Progress report maintains that paid work can be a building block for achieving substantive equality for women. When domestic and care duties are shared between genders, women have increased leisure and learning time, the gender pay gap is mitigated, and women are treated with dignity and respect they deserve. Policy recommendations are also suggested to ensure the achievement of these goals, including investments in infrastructure and services and broader access to maternity and parental leave for all women, particularly those in the informal sector. The report also condemns the practice of relying on social policies, such as the welfare state, to help mitigate the undesirable effects of macroeconomic policies. Thus, a fundamental transformation required to achieve substantive equality for women is the formulation of macroeconomic policies with gender equality and social justice as their principle targets.

The final positive message emerging from the UNW report is its awareness of the gender biases inherent in the macro-economic policy agendas that define contemporary globalization. Unlike the World Bank, the UN is not ideologically committed to the values of neoliberalism. As a result, UNW can openly issue the following statement in the opening pages of their report: “But while gender equality clearly contributes to broader economic and social goals, not all pathways to economic development advance gender equality. Indeed, some patterns of economic growth are premised on maintaining gender inequalities in conditions of work and earnings and enforcing unequal patterns of unpaid work that consign women to domestic drudgery”.

In making such an explicit criticism of the predominant economic logic of current globalization, UNW marks a laudable break from many previous global reports, particularly the World Bank’s 2012 World Development Report. This statement affirms what a wealth of evidence-based research and advocacy has been saying for several years, namely that neoliberal globalization has had a detrimental impact on the achievement of gender equality [1]. The denunciation of neoliberal policies is likely a result of the UNW carefully considering the implications of simply recycling previously contested failures (the international community is now widely acknowledged to be in a post-Washington consensus era in which neoliberal hegemony is no longer taken for granted) and deciding instead to undertake new research geared towards identifying alternative macroeconomic frameworks.

The Progress report dedicates the entire final chapter to an open condemnation of macroeconomic policies that hinder gender equality, including paying insufficient attention to job creation and the impediments that women have to overcome in the labor market, as well as fiscal austerity programs which, despite being assumed to be ‘gender neutral’, instead disproportionately affect women by reducing the space for social policies supportive of gender equality. Because many UN member states are committed advocates of neoliberal policies, the UNW report’s critique is far gentler and less direct than those previously put forward by civil society, with the term ‘neoliberal’ referenced only three times throughout its entirety. However, it does provide alternative economic approaches far more conducive to the realization of women’s social and economic rights, calling for a human rights framework for macroeconomic policy. Developed by a team of experts in international law and human rights, the Maastricht Principle emphasizes: extraterritorial obligations and global cooperation, the adoption of a coordinated approach to tax policy, preventing international trade and investment agreements from curtailing policy space in a way that restrictions substantive equality and the realization of rights, and finally increasing women’s representation in leadership positions in global economic governance institutions.

Despite the many positive features that emerge from the report, there are also a number of major gaps and problematic policy implications that require critical scrutiny. Specifically, the report falls short, in its understanding of what radical transformative change truly entails. By failing to engage seriously with other actors beyond the state and indigenous feminist critiques of the state, the Progress Report is not entirely successful in outlining a comprehensive plan for creating a more equal and just society for all women.

The chief purpose of the UNW report is to convince governments to adopt its suggestions. In his foreword, Ban Ki-Moon notes that the report is a timely reminder to states of the importance of women’s economic and social rights. The report further expands on the notion of state responsibility by emphasizing that UN members’ obligation to respect, protect, and fulfill women’s rights is entrenched within the international human rights system, such as in Article 3 of CEDAW.

Undeniably, the focus on states as the duty-bearers of women’s rights is understandable giving that the UN is an international organization made up of 193 member states. However, this state-centric approach is limited in a variety of ways. First, the focus on states obscures the various transnational advocacy networks (TANs) in the issue area of human rights that have helped change world politics. Their ability to make issues digestible to target audience, attract attention and encourage action makes TANs an important strategic actor in the field of global governance. TANs’ ability to promote new norms and encourage norm implementation by pressuring target actors to adopt new policies, as well as to monitor compliance with regional and international standards, is of strategic importance to UNW and the realization of its goals.

Applying indigenous feminist critiques of the state further illustrates the limitations of the UNW’s state-centric approach. Indigenous feminists are highly critical of the state and do not typically view it as a vehicle for their emancipation. The legacy of settler-colonialism, genocide, and racism leads many indigenous people to instead see the nation-state as the source of their continued oppression. As advocates of gender justice, indigenous feminists would demand that the Progress report transcend the discourse of the nation-state as the duty bearers of women’s rights. Undeniably, the privileging of states is a product of the UN’s commitment to supporting its members. Nonetheless, considering the multiplicity of ways in which contemporary globalization impacts social policy, it is imperative that the UN acknowledge that non-state actors also have both a duty and a role in realizing women’s rights, and provide recognition to the communities sidelined by their state-centric approach.

Bob Deacon provides an interesting explanation as to why global political institutions tend to lag behind in their recognition of alternative global actors, particularly in their published documents, despite the emergence of a global civil society sharing a common political space with state actors [2]. Deacon argues that international organizations like the UN are to a large extent stuck in an earlier historical epoch marked by inter-governmental agreements, leading him to conclude that such organizations need to be reformed to better govern global social policy.

The UN Women’s (UNW) flagship report “Progress of the World’s Women 2015-2016: Transforming Economies, Realizing Rights” sought to understand, research, critically analyze, and intervene in the issue of gender inequality. By marrying the language of human rights with the goals of economic policymaking, the report was able to offer a far-reaching policy agenda to help transform economies and make women’s rights a reality around the world. The report is largely successful. It a) recognized privilege, oppression, and intersectionality; b) appreciated the difference between formal and substantive equality; and c) was cognizant of the gender biases that are inherent in macro-economic policy agenda’s that define contemporary globalization. Unfortunately, the report also falls short in its understanding of what radical transformative change truly entails. In failing to engage seriously with a) other actors beyond the state and indigenous feminist critiques of the state, the Progress Report is not entirely successful in outlining a comprehensive plan for creating a more equal and just society for all women.

 

Aramide Odutayo is a Masters of Arts Candidate at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. Her research covers themes at the interface of global governance, gender, migration, and social justice.

Notes

[1] Gita Sen, “Commentary on Progress of the World’s Women 2015-2016: Transforming Economies, Realizing Rights,” Global Social Policy 16 (1): 2.
 

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