Gender equality, at home and at work, must be central to development efforts

Significant progress made by women in education hasn’t yet translated into comparable improvements in their position at work. This situation must be addressed immediately if we are to achieve our social and economic development goals.

News | 15 March 2016

“If current trends prevail, it will take more than 70 years to close the gender wage gap” stated Vinicius Pinheiro, Special Representative and Director of ILO Office for the UN, at briefing for delegates from the Missions to the UN.

The ILO’s newly released report entitled “Women at Work – Trends 2016” was presented on the eve of the 60th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). The briefing on the report was co-organized by the Permanent Missions of Brazil and Sweden in cooperation with the ILO.

The report provides data for up 178 countries on the state of women in the world of work and identifies major gender gaps with respect to labour force participation rates, wages, working hours, social protection coverage, and occupation segregation.

The Women at Work Report not only paints a clear picture of the barriers that interfere with development objectives and that are holding women back, it also offers clear guidance on what needs to be done to overcome these barriers.

Ambassador Patriota of Brazil, chair of the CSW, said that “we must face the stark reality that persisting gender gap in employment, earnings' difference and unequal sharing of child care and domestic work between men and women reduce the development prospects of societies at large.”

He indicated that Member States are considering the topic of “women’s economic empowerment in the changing world” as the priority theme for next year’s CSW. Continuing he stated that CSW “will greatly benefit from the expertise of ILO and will draw inspiration from this very important report in order to push for the transformative effect that the economic empowerment of women can have on social progress, economic growth and development”.

Magnus Lennartsson, representative from the Permanent Mission of Sweden to the UN, highlighted how important it is to ‘cover the invisible’ people at work and in society. He stated that the report offers an excellent foundation for stronger coverage of care work and systematic monitoring of care work disparities, which he described as crucial to achieving progress and accountability.

He stated that labour rights need to be monitored more closely at the international level including unpaid or poorly paid care work, are essential to the success of the 2030 Agenda on sustainable development.

In her statement, Lakshmi Puri, Assistant Secretary-General and Deputy Executive Director of UN Women, emphasized the report’s significance in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals. She said that the realization of the principle of ‘leaving no one behind’ depends to a large extend on the achievement of full and productive employment for all and on tackling the gendered disparities that permeate the world of work, including gendered forms of occupational segregation.

Mr. Vinicius Pinheiro called for a rights-based integrated approach to close the gender gaps in the world of work and achieve equality between men and women, in accordance with the new sustainable development goals, is an integrated framework of transformative measures.

The ILO maintains that this framework needs to connect goal 1 (on poverty reduction) with goal 10 (on inequalities), goal 5 (gender equality) and goal 8 (decent work for all) in accordance with, and guided by ILO Conventions and Recommendations. “Business as usual is not an option! We can’t wait 70 years to close the gender pay gap”, he added.

The participants also mentioned the importance of strengthening the national and international statistical capacities in order to produce reliable labour statistics disaggregated by sex to monitor the SDGs achievements. The SDGs indicators framework agreed at the UN Statistical Commission is a fundamental step towards building a comprehensive review and follow up mechanism.

Speakers concluded by reiterating that achieving gender equality at work is a fundamental precondition for the realization of a sustainable development agenda that leaves no one behind and promotes decent work for all.