Written by Emily Esplen of Womankind Worldwide and the Gender and Development Network.
With the 2015 MDG deadline looming, the question of ‘what comes next’ is being hotly debated in development circles. In the face of increasing backlash against women’s rights globally and a risk of reversals in fragile progress on gender equality, there is a powerful case for maintaining a strong and explicit focus on gender equality beyond 2015.
Women still disproportionately represented among the poorest
Despite hard won gains on women’s rights over the past 15 years, gender inequality has proven more intractable than anticipated and remains a major driver of women’s poverty. Women account for about two-thirds of the 1.4 billion people globally who live in extreme poverty. United Nations data shows that women across sub-Saharan Africa are more likely than men to live in a poor household – up to 20% more likely for women of working age. A similar picture has been identified in Latin America. Gender equality must therefore be central to the post-2015 framework because women are disproportionately represented among the poorest and most marginalised people in the world, and without specifically addressing gender inequality, women’s poverty will persist.
Gender is the most pervasive form of inequality
Mounting consensus around the need for the post-2015 framework to tackle the inequalities that generate in poverty is a cause for much optimism. It also offers an important entry point to push for a stronger focus on gender inequality, alongside other dimensions of inequality. Gender inequality is the most pervasive form of social inequality. It cuts across all other forms of inequality, so that women from excluded groups face a double whammy of oppression – as discrimination along lines of race, ethnicity, caste, age, sexuality or disability intersect with and are compounded by sexism.
Unlike some other excluded groups, women and girls are subject to inequality not only in the public sphere but in their most intimate and private spaces – within their homes, in their intimate relationships. So for women and girls, discrimination is not only at the point of interface with the state or a service provider, as is the case for many other excluded groups, but also permeates the private realm – for example, being refused permission even to leave the house, decide how their income is spent, or if and how many children to have. Tackling the lack of power in private and intimate spheres which prevents women from taking control over their lives is therefore essential in confronting the root causes of women’s poverty.
Gender inequality is a barrier to tackling poverty
Tackling women’s lack of power is also essential for achieving other positive development outcomes – on maternal health, for example, or HIV, or child mortality. Research by the OECD found that women’s access to resources is strongly correlated with child health outcomes. Countries where women lack any right to own land have on average 60% more malnourished children; this rises to 85% where women lack access to credit.
There is also a clear link between levels of gender discrimination and rates of maternal mortality, even when taking country income into account. It is no coincidence that the most off-track of all the MDGs is on maternal health – an issue which is rooted not only in poverty but in gender inequality and women’s low status in society. The OECD also looked at other indicators including primary school education, cereal yields and access to safe drinking water – all of which revealed similar results. The strong relationship between gender inequality and poverty thus underlines the importance of retaining a strong focus on gender in the post-2015 deliberations.
Hard won gains are under attack
We’re also operating in a much more precarious and troubling context than we did in the mid-1990s when the existing MDGs were being agreed. Gains on women’s rights are increasingly under attack and there is a risk of losing ground unless progressive governments continue to champion women’s rights. In particular, the growing strength of religious fundamentalisms over the past 10 years, in every region and religion, is having a huge impact on women’s rights – leading to backlash against women’s autonomy, re-assertion of traditional gender roles, restrictions on female mobility, and intense battles over women’s bodies. This year’s UN Commission on the Status of Women, for example, closed without any resolution for the first time due to failure to agree and challenges to already-established language by conservative forces. There was also a vicious assault on women’s reproductive rights at the Rio+20 UN Summit in June. In the face of such opposition there is a real risk of reversals in progress on gender equality unless we keep up the focus and continue to support the women’s rights organisations all over the world that are spearheading struggles for equality, often in the face of violent opposition.
The need for a dedicated gender goal
It’s for all these reasons that I believe it’s critical to maintain a strong focus on women’s rights in the post-2015 global development framework. Prime Minister David Cameron’s recent promise to ‘personally ensure that the fight for the empowerment of women is at the heart of the international process [he’s] co-chairing to renew the millennium development goals’ was a welcome signal. But this needs to translate into more than mainstreaming gender across any new framework, vital as this is. Truly putting women’s empowerment at the heart of the post-2015 framework will require a two-pronged approach of mainstreaming gender in targets and indicators across the board, and a standalone goal or domain for gender equality.
Only a dedicated gender equality goal will allow the specific determinants or structural causes of gender inequality to be dealt with. Merely addressing and monitoring the reduction of gender gaps is not ambitious enough; we need to build a framework capable of transforming the structural drivers of women’s inequality – the forces that make and keep women poor (and create gender gaps in the first place). This will require a dedicated gender goal with transformative targets that lead to changes in women’s control over their lives – such as greater ownership and control of economic assets, more influence in political decision-making, and freedom from violence.
For all its short-comings, MDG3 has shown the impact that a dedicated focus on gender can have. It has proved a powerful advocacy tool that has increased attention to women and girls among influential institutions like the World Bank and acted as an impetus to expand funding for gender equality. For example, the MDG3 and Flow Funds set up by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands represent a historic commitment to gender equality. The UK has also made women and girls a development priority in a way that is unprecedented. At this particular juncture, there is therefore an emerging consensus on the importance of gender equality which begs the question: why risk going backwards?
Written by Emily Esplen of Womankind Worldwide and the Gender and Development Network.
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