[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about the rights violations women and girls endure and about where actions must be focused to address them. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traduzca/traduizes los/les Readers: Use deepl.com .
1. As pertains to the rights of women in our troubled world, the three main ‘evils’ one ought to consider are: a) Gender-based violence, b) loss of jobs and livelihoods, and c) sharp increase in women’s already disproportionate share of unpaid work.
2. But there unfortunately are a host of other ‘evils’ that need to be pointed out since they also call for decisive action on them. Here I present them in no particular order. (All taken from Nawi)
The state the culprit?
3. Is it the case of state-led-Capitalism that has gendered consequences?
- Access to judicial and legal services continues to be blocked by legal discrimination against women.
- The gender pay gap remains unaddressed: undervaluation of work in feminized occupations remains prevalent on a global scale. Add to this the ‘motherhood gap’ that penalizes motherhood in the workspace.
- States are breaking existing social contracts and this adversely affects the majority of populations living in poverty and indignity –women being that majority. Why? Because the prevailing models rely on the invisibilized and exploitative labor of women, whether this labor is paid or unpaid. (Models of privatization are deepening and cementing these inequalities).
- National identity cards issuing still have serious gender gaps.
- Public transport services for women and girls are neglected including their safety in them. Lack of mobility impacts access to essential services, a problem when transport services are ineffective and of poor quality; this increases women’s overall stress and also influences the kind of paid work they can take-on.
- Women and girls’ school attendance is skewed and their access to sexual and reproductive health and pregnancy and child birth-related services are restricted putting them at risk of personal safety plus risks of harassment.
- Countries are unable to absorb all the health workers they train (mostly women); we thus see high health workers unemployment rates in the midst of acute health workers shortages.
- Women are further kept weak, because they are more likely to claim social welfare payments, use public services and be employed by the public sector where they are unfairly treated.
Care provided by women sustains households and communities
–The neoliberal economic model neither values care nor recognizes the human right (HR) to care yet benefits from it immensely through free or cheap labor.
–Women’s work that is done in communities (not only in the household) must not be neglected –not forgetting that unpaid community work increases in crisis situations.
4. The current social division of care is unequal, gendered, racialized and classed actively exploiting women’s labor from the household* through to paid public and private provision, effectively undermining their rights.
*: Ponder: Women and girls spend an incredible amount of time sourcing water and fuelwood.
5. Childcare remains a problem. Women in the popular economy have little or no labor protection and no access to daycare services. Childcare has the potential to provide decent jobs for millions of women. However, there have been widespread closures of childcare centers.
6. What is otherwise at stake? Feminist movements push for recognizing care as a HR; for rewarding and remunerating care work through equal pay, decent pensions, dignified working conditions and comprehensive social protection; also for reducing the burden of unpaid care work on women and redistributing care work within the household, as well as reclaiming the public nature of care services by restoring the duty of the state for public care services and mobilizing needed financing.
Add some international ‘evils’
–Women’s voices remain systematically locked out despite the direct impact on their livelihoods and rights.
7. It goes without saying that the debt crisis has a direct bearing on the ability of governments to effectively deliver public services. When debt means that states reduce social spending, impose austerity policies and deprive people of common goods, women carry the greater weight of it.
8. Feminist analyses of public private partnerships (PPPs) in the Global South (the majority of the world!) shows how private in-transparent financing is imposed driven by profit that is blind to the needs/priorities of the citizen (and women) they claim to benefit. PPPs lead to poor priority setting and come at great risk to the public good as all risks fall on the public purse (they privatize profits and socialize risk and losses). Most PPPs are more expensive than traditional government investment; they have a direct impact on women’s livelihoods through declines in the quality of services due to segmentation of users on the basis of ability to pay. Add to this a deterioration of working standards due to the promotion of casual contracts.
Needed: Make public money work for the public … and for women and girls
–Public services essentially deliver human rights!
9. Public services must be public in nature (not an oxymoron). They must serve the people, be accountable to the people and must be financed by the state. All claim holders (particularly women) must be able to hold any institution or body with a public mandate responsible and answerable for their decisions, actions and activities. This includes private sector actors involved in public service delivery in any way. Key elements are: publicly funded, publicly delivered and publicly governed.
Needed: Gender parity
10. Only 25% of countries in Sub-saharan Africa have achieved gender parity in the public sector. Attention must be given to the difference in participation in urban and rural areas. Even in countries where women are well represented in the public sector, they are less likely to advance into management and leadership positions.
11. Women are the biggest reserve army of labor. Women’s unpaid and underpaid labor subsidizes the state. Most crucially, privatization means that women are forced to borrow or stretch existing meagre resources to pay user fees or out of pocket payments. Waiving user fees does not automatically translate into free services or no cost. (Privatization only works in places and situations deemed profitable…).
12. Should organized women’s groups take-on both patriarchy and imperial Capitalism to the degree that this is needed?
- The call is for a complete overhaul of how economies and societies are governed and organized.
- It also is about calling for the dismantling of neocolonial, patriarchal, racialized and classed inequalities including the gender division of labor. (But beware: It is not enough to guarantee rights. Feminists must act upon the fact that there are individuals and groups for whom those rights remain inaccessible –women the largest such group.
- Feminists must further demand a progressive taxation system that stress its redistributive potential to eliminate gender inequalities, as well as struggle to secure women’s rights to public services.
Bottom line
-Feminists have a lot to learn by applying the indigenous ethics that calls for the disruption of legacies of gender domination.
13. Whatever the questions opened up here, they need to be the questions that women formulate out of their own understanding of their social and political contexts. (Lyn Ossome) This includes women forcefully demanding their freedom of assembly, association and demonstration. (Most taken from Nawi)
14. And, last-but-not-least: The anti-gender movements have deep pockets which they deploy in opposition to universal human rights work in general and women’s rights in particular. This makes the situation even more untenable. (Tynesha Mc Harris, Swatee Deepak)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com
Postscript Marginalia
-Some additional loose ends:
- Women need to know what was achieved and indeed what was lost in the past. (Amina Mama)
- Informal economies have to be recognized as the engine of markets. Among other, this means giving decent work rights to women workers in the informal economy. Moreover, a) agroecological smallholders (importantly women) have to also be valued as guardians of biodiversity; and b) women contribute significantly to waste management by doing most of the recycling.
- Sexual and reproductive health must include people who are gender divers and non-binary; this group faces extreme discrimination in access to services and have mental health problems. (32 countries in Africa criminalize homosexuality fostering a culture of homophobia).