By Asmau Ahmad
The UN Women has published a flagship feminist plan for economic recovery and transformation, which aims to learn the lessons of the past and seize the opportunity to handle COVID-related crises better.
The UN’s gender equality and empowerment organisation stated this in a report on “UN Women’s Beyond COVID-19: A Feminist Plan for Sustainability and Social Justice.”
The report draws on the latest data, analysis and input from more than 100 global experts to provide concrete pathways for putting gender equality, environmental sustainability and social justice at the centre of global development efforts.
“We have a generational opportunity to break the vicious cycle of economic insecurity, environmental destruction and exclusionary politics and shape a better, more gender-equal and sustainable world,” Pramila Patten, UN-Women’s Acting Executive Director said.
In the first UN plan of its kind, the report details how the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing gender inequalities and laid bare weaknesses in the already fragile global care economy.
“Globally, in 2019 and 2020, women lost 54 million jobs, and even before the pandemic, they took on three times as much unpaid care work as men,” according to UN Women.
Moreover, women are disproportionately impacted by environmental degradation while also being left out of decision-making around policy and financing to address climate change.
And by the end of 2021, men’s jobs will have recovered, but there will still be 13 million fewer women in employment, the gender empowerment agency pointed out.
The trio of interconnected crises of jobs, care and climate, systematically undermine gender equality and threaten the survival of people and planet, but there is still an opportunity to change course.
“Today’s report provides a roadmap for how to do this, while recovering the ground that’s been lost on gender equality and women’s rights,” Patten said.
To address these intersecting crises, UN Women is calling for better policy, action and investment, including in the care economy and social infrastructure, such as creating jobs and increasing support for unpaid caregivers.
The report maintains that public investments in care services could create 40 to 60 per cent more jobs than the same investments in construction.
Under the premise that transitioning to environmental sustainability can create up to 24 million new green jobs, the report stresses that women should have their fair share of these opportunities, including by getting the necessary training and skills.
And women’s leadership must be promoted across institutional spaces, from governments to civil society and the private sector, and especially in crisis response.
Despite having been on the frontlines of the COVID-19 response, making up 70 per cent of healthcare workers globally, the roadmap notes that women currently hold only 24 per cent of seats on COVID-19 taskforces that have coordinated the policy response around the world.
Moreover, despite their critical roles as watchdogs and providing a social safety net in communities, women’s organisations are woefully under-funded.
In 2018-19, women’s rights organisations received only one per cent of all aid allocated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to gender equality, amounting to only a tiny fraction of total aid.
To finance these measures, transformative macroeconomic policies – including progressive taxes and, especially for low-income countries, global cooperation and debt relief – are urgently needed, the report says.
Equally important will be to achieve a shift in power relations to amplify the voices of historically excluded groups and ensure effective gender mainstreaming.
