UNIFEM: Progress of the World’s Women 2008/2009, Who Answers to Women?

Released by the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), Progress of the World’s Women 2008/2009: Who Accounts to Women? reveals that much stronger accountability mechanisms for tracking progress on gender equality are needed in order to meet national and international commitments to women’s rights.

Accountability to women begins with increasing the number of women in decision-making positions, but it cannot stop there, it stresses. The report focuses on five key areas where the need to strengthen accountability to women is urgent: politics and governance, access to public services, economic opportunities, justice, and finally the distribution of international assistance for development and security. In each of these areas the report details means of building State capacity - or good governance - from a women’s rights perspective.

Implementation still has a long way to go in translating commitments to women’s rights into changes in women’s lives. To date, women are outnumbered four to one in legislatures around the world; over 60% of all unpaid family workers globally are women; women still earn on average 17% less than men, and about one-third of women suffer gender-based violence during their lives. In some parts of the world, one in ten women dies from pregnancy-related causes, even though the means for preventing maternal mortality are cost-effective and well known.

The report puts forth a framework for understanding accountability from a gender perspective and applies this to different contexts in which accountability systems determine women’s access to resources and power: politics, public services, labour, consumer and trade markets, justice systems, and international aid and security institutions. It also provides an assessment of each of the Millennium Development Goals from a gender perspective.

Accountability cannot result from demand-side pressures alone. Progress of the World’s Women 2008/2009 demonstrates innovative examples of States and international institutions taking steps to increase the supply side of accountability. This implies gender-responsive changes in the mandates, practices, and cultures of these institutions to ensure that there are incentives and consequences for upholding their commitments to women’s rights.

Some of the key findings and recommendations in the report include:
 Multilateral aid and security institutions can do much more to meet their own commitments and standards on gender equality. To date, no agreed system-wide tracking mechanism exists within multilaterals such as the United Nations and the International Financial Institutions, to assess the amount of aid allocated to gender equality or women’s empowerment.

 Public service delivery that responds to women’s needs is the real litmus test of government accountability. Women continue to face barriers to health, education and agricultural support services. They are denied access because health clinics and schools are often too distant or costly, agricultural services are geared towards male farmers, and government services routinely target employed, literate or propertied men.

 One form of accountability failure is corruption, and women’s experiences are different from those of men. In developed countries, 30% more women than men perceive high levels of corruption in the education system, and a gendered difference in perceptions of corruption are seen in most other parts of the world as well. Women may also experience corruption differently from men, for instance, when sexual extortion is one of the forms in which informal payments are extracted.

 Even though in the last decade the number of women parliamentarians at the national level has increased by 8% to a global average of 18.4%, developing countries will still not reach the “parity zone” of 40%-60% percent until 2045. Quotas or other special measures are effective in ensuring progress: women hold an average of 19.3% of parliamentary seats in countries that applied some form of electoral quota, compared to 14.7% in countries with no quotas.

 Real improvement in women’s access to justice needs gender-based changes in law enforcement and informal justice institutions. For example, the report notes the presence of an all-female women contingent in Liberia is encouraging women to engage with the police. Similar examples can be found in other post-conflict contexts, such as Timor-Leste and Kosovo.

 Women are extremely vulnerable to shifting patterns in global markets in the absence of measures that protect them, such as during the recent food crisis, for they not only assume primary responsibility for feeding their families but also contribute as much as 50%-80% of agricultural labour in Asia and Africa. Similarly, women’s employment and migration are also shaped by global trends. The “brain drain” from South to North of people with tertiary education has recently become feminized, with more professional women migrating than men. This has implications for women’s economic leadership in developing countries, the report cautions.

“Good governance needs women, and women need good governance,” said Anne Marie Goetz, lead author of the report. “Women have a different perspective on accountability because they often experience accountability failures differently from men. This report argues that good governance needs women’s engagement - just as gender equality requires States that are accountable and capable of delivering on promises of women’s rights.”

Progress of the World’s Women 2008/2009 is available online: (www.unifem.org/progress/2008...).

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