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Op-eds and articles by the Executive Secretary |
| The Crisis is not an Excuse to Detain Women's Progress in Every Sphere This 8 March millions of women around the world will celebrate our international day, a commemoration of over a century and a half of working women's struggles. Discontent in textile factories in the United States planted the seed that later millions of women everywhere would uphold. Finally, labour, political and sexual rights were coming together in one sole liberating and just banner, provoking the biggest political, economic and social change in humanity of the 20th century. We are heirs of that heroic deed. Today, thousands of women in the world enjoy the opportunities, freedoms and responsibilities that our grandmothers never dreamed of. And our daughters will live in a world where gender inequalities will eventually be a thing of the past. We have changed women and we have also made men change. That fills us with satisfaction and hope. However, we see with great concern the delays and economic, political and cultural barriers that, even in the 21st century, impede the full effect and exercise of women's rights. We are going through difficult times. The current financial crisis will strike our region strongly in the coming months and it is highly likely that it will augment women's vulnerability. This may happen because formal employment in general will drop and with it, the number of women working under decent labour conditions, because household income, including remittances, will go down, or because the unstable and badly paid jobs - where women are the majority - will become even more precarious. Even sectors where women were able to improve their employment conditions in the past few decades, such as in maquilas or the agro-export sector, will recede, pushing women towards worse paid or informal jobs. Another expected effect will be a greater transfer of unpaid activities to households, due to diminishing income and probable cuts in public services, which will impact negatively on the total workload. Women's domestic work of reproduction and caregiving may increase. How can we prevent the crisis from becoming an enemy of women's progress? With a protection agenda that includes: raising the barriers women face in their access to dignified jobs and freeing them from the exclusive responsibility of domestic work through, for example, child care services for men and women; reforms to eradicate discrimination in work contracts or wages; funneling support and minimum income to the most vulnerable women and tax-free pensions for women who dedicated their lives to unpaid domestic work or small-scale, informal activities without access to formal mechanisms of social protection. Poor women should be given preferential access to income-generating assets such as microloans, training, housing and health services, especially reproductive. In addition to proper macroeconomic management, measures must be taken to maintain social spending through countercyclical fiscal policies; avoid protectionism in international trade; ensure that lower investment does not lead to greater female unemployment; promote packages to stimulate aggregate demand and maintain Official Development Assistance. The effects of the crisis on monetary, fiscal and exchange rate policies must also be counteracted and public investment geared at facilitating the co-responsibility of family care among men and women should be increased. We have to prevent the crisis from becoming an excuse to detain women's progress. The crisis revealed how mistaken those who believed in the capacity of self-regulation of financial markets were. Those of us who have sustained for years the need to build a new international financial architecture are encouraged to advance towards an even more ambitious discussion: What is today the new equation between the State, the market and society that may ensure economic progress that is environmentally sustainable and may reduce poverty and inequality? One thing is sure and that is that we cannot continue to live with current consumption and waste patterns. We need to move forward to a more sustainable and efficient economy and women have a historical role to play in this direction. Women become greater in times of crisis: wars, natural catastrophes, economic depression and political turmoil have been witnesses to their generous dedication and capacity to multiply and cover more responsibilities. However, the process also exhausts them, and often, once the storm has passed, women are left out of places and opportunities that are hard to recover. Let's not allow that to happen again. Let's promise to prevent the current economic crisis from being an excuse to detain women's progress in all spheres. Alicia Bárcena, |