Women Still Sidelined in Economic Decision-Making

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 27 (IPS) - Gender equality contributes to
economic growth, but economic growth does not always contribute
to gender equality, says the United Nations World Survey on the
Role of Women in Development launched Tuesday, a message well
timed in the context of the current financial crisis.

Women's participation in the economic sector has been proven to
underpin Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) such as poverty
reduction, child health and education.

Still, "The lack of women's access to financial resources, as
well as their underrepresentation in institutions such as banks
and ministries of finance, is striking," says James Heintz,
associate director of the Political Economy Research Institute at
the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Built upon recent statistics and academic research, the World
Survey, published every five years by the U.N. Department of
Economic and Social Affairs, focuses this year on "women's
control over economic resources and access to financial
resources, including microfinance".

Data from 70 countries shows that women hold only 27 percent of
positions classified as having "status, influence, power and
decision-making authority", with regional variation of 31 percent
in Latin America, and nine percent in the Middle East.

In the European Union, women ministers of the 27 member states
were far more likely to hold portfolios relating to social
affairs such as youth, health and education (26.7 percent),
rather than the economy (17.7 percent).

The marginalisation of women from influential posts is hardly
limited to developing regions. Almost half of the large
companies in countries covered by the Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) have no women on their boards,
while only 23 percent have more than one woman.

While programmes of microfinance were well intended and
relatively successful in the poorest countries, especially in
Latin America and Asia, microfinance "has failed to meet the
needs of women entrepreneurs in business growth and expansions",
the survey concluded.

"The evaluation tells us that is simply not enough to give
small amounts of money to women, and expect them to become equal
players," says Naila Kabeer, lead author of the survey and a
professorial fellow at the Institute of Development Studies in
the United Kingdom.

"We need to open up access to the broader financial sector, and
we need to put far more emphasis on financial services apart
from credit, such as insurances, savings, assets and remittance
transfers," she added.

Kabeer explained that for microfinance to work properly, it
needs to be embedded in a package of services that address the
existing constraints faced by many women, such as child care
support.

Another problem is the copy-the-past mechanism that has been
too often applied to microfinance, Kabeer admitted. "What worked
in a poor Asian country, may not work in West Africa, where there
is a long tradition of female entrepreneurship," she noted.

Control over economic resources also includes access to full
employment and decent work, as "labour is the most widely
available factor of production at the disposal of poor people
around the world and the primary means through which they earn a
living", says the survey.

Overall, women show increased levels of employment, but this
increase has been mainly in the informal sector, which is
generally insecure, poorly paid, and not covered by labour
legislation or social protection.

In the formal sector, women's wages have been reported to be
16.5 percent less than men's.

Kabeer asked for more research on the nature of constraints
that keep women in inferior positions in the labour market, and
therefore captive to sometimes unreliable husbands or
discriminatory laws.

Of particular concern is the unequal sharing of unpaid work
between women and men, in both Northern and Southern countries,
a situation that has not significantly improved and continues to
constrain women's employment choices and opportunities.

"The issue of unpaid responsibilities of women is one of the
things that has really struck me, since even the wealthiest
countries with a lot of gender-sensitive policies put in place,
still seem to struggle with it," Kabeer said.

Besides labour, lack of access to land and property, another
area of gender inequality touched upon in the survey, is still
considerable due to discriminatory inheritance practices and
gender-biased land reform.

In many African countries, for example, the wife loses her
house and land when her husband dies.

The survey recommends that policymakers rethink their economic
growth strategies and pay attention to women's economic
empowerment, especially in the current recession.

Heintz underlined that although many of the macroeconomic
aspects of the current crisis do not appear to be
gender-specific, the report does document ways in which
macroeconomic changes have gender-specific impacts, and need a
gender-specific response.

Most importantly, he said, gender equality in finance and
business must be viewed as not only a women's rights issue, but
an economic imperative.