Series on Gender and Employment: Identification of Economic Opportunities for Women's Groups and Communities

Spanish version (Identificación de Oportunidades Económicas para los Grupos de Mujeres y Comunidades) also available

• "More and better jobs for women and men" PDF
• "Davantage d'emplois et de meilleurs emplois pour les femmes et les hommes" PDF
• "Más et mejores empleos para las mujeres y los hombres" PDF

ABC of women workers' right (in Estonian)

(Unofficial Translation in Estonian of the Publication by the ILO's Gender Bureau in English)

To order a copy, please contact the secretariat genprom@ilo.org

Tel: 41-22 799 6090 - Fax: 41-22 799 7657

More and Better Jobs for Women:

An Action Guide
By Lin Lean Lim
(193pp)

This guide to policy and programme options is an ILO contribution to the successful implementation of the work initiated by two milestone conferences in 1995 - the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing) and the World Summit on Social Development (Copenhagen).

Quantitative increases in women's economic participation in the past two decades have not generally been matched by qualitative improvements or better working conditions. A priority of the Beijing Platform for Action is therefore to improve the quantity and quality of employment for women. In addition, the Copenhagen Declaration on Social Development commits governments to "formulate or strengthen policies and practices to ensure that women are enabled to participate fully in paid work and in employment".

This book outlines the significance of women's employment and the critical concerns and objectives of integrated and comprehensive strategies for action. It describes the main types of action for improving women's economic position, and offers advice on how to enhance the quality of female human resources, increase investment in education and training for women, improve women's access to employment and income-earning opportunities, ensure better terms and conditions of work, and provide social protection for working women.

Many of the book's guidelines embody the principles of ILO standards, which are used as benchmarks in both the Beijing Platform and the Copenhagen Programme. In order for the goals of the Beijing and Copenhagen declarations to be achieved, both documents urge that ILO Conventions should be more widely observed.

It is hoped that this book will assist the social partners to provide more and better jobs for women, to promote equality of opportunity and treatment in the workplace and support particularly disadvantaged groups of poor women.

International Programme on More and Better Jobs for Women

The ILO International Programme on More and Better Jobs for Women is a specific response to the successful implementation of the Platform of Action of the 4th World Conference on Women and the gender dimensions of the Programme of Action of the World Summit for Social Development. It further represents a concerted effort to reinforce the ILO's long standing priorities to promote full employment in conditions of equality.

The programme emphasises that, it is possible to achieve an acceptable and feasible balance between more and better jobs; more jobs for women does not mean less jobs for men and that better jobs can benefit both men and women, whereby women's productive and remunerative employment helps families, societies and economies.

The immediate objectives of the International Programme on More and Better Jobs for Women are:

• To enhance the capacity of the social partners and strengthen legal and institutional frameworks for improving the gender-sensitivity and employment impact of development in the participating countries; and
• To promote more effective and sustainable policies and programmes and "good practice" for providing more and better jobs for women through the systematic and efficient accumulation and dissemination of information and experiences between countries and regions and among the social partners and international organizations.

The brochure highlights these aims and objectives and provides a detailed overview of the mechanism of the ILO International Programme on More and Better Jobs for Women. It is hoped that the brochure will create a greater awareness of the Programme itself and that it is possible to achieve more and better jobs for women.

The Sex Sector: The Economic and Social Bases of Prostitution in South-East Asia
edited by Lin Lean Lim
(232 pp.)

The subject of prostitution raises issues relating to basic human rights, morality, employment and working conditions, gender discrimination, health threats and criminality. To help define the challenges and dilemmas confronting governments around the world, this book includes case studies from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand prepared by highly-respected national and international researchers. The case studies illustrate the situation in many countries worldwide, not just in Southeast Asia, which have a significant sex sector. They show that, like other economic sectors, prostitution has well-organized and highly diversified structures, and involves complex economic relations that give it the dimensions of an industry. In addition to its economic bases, which involve a significant scale of operations and interlinkages with the national and international economies, prostitution has social components relating to unequal relations between men and women, as well as between children and parents. The national studies include the results of small surveys to show that the circumstances of those in prostitution range from freely chosen and remunerative employment to debt bondage and virtual slavery. The different modes of entry into the sector, and the possibility of making a distinction between voluntary and coerced prostitution, help to explain why it is difficult for policy makers and legislators to define a clear legal stance on adult prostitution, or to implement effective social programmes. In the case of children, however, a chapter on child prostitution shows clearly that it constitutes a serious human rights violation and an intolerable form of child labour.