Compass Gender: the Beijing+25 Report
Hillary Clinton speaks at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 (Wikimedia Commons)
Points of Entry
It is clear that despite the victories of the women’s rights movement thus far, there is plenty of progress left to be made. The report identifies several “potential entry points” where pushing for increased equity could have major benefits.
Many legislative changes have expanded women’s legal rights in the past several decades. However, progress in the law is not sufficient to ensure equality in all spheres of life. The new report highlights persistent societal gender norms and the insufficient implementation of legal changes as extralegal factors hindering women’s progress. For instance, unpaid care work, often unacknowledged as labor, is predominantly done by women. The report gives one example of progress by MenCare+, an international program that educates fathers on childcare. It also examines women’s representation in the media, where in 2015, only 19 percent of experts and 37 percent of reporters shown in global media were women. To combat lacking implementation of policy changes, the report encourages governments to invest in their communities by allocating resources to local organizations offering “social protection” such as women’s centers and reproductive health centers.
Women around the world on average spend more time than men doing unpaid care work (Our World in Data).
The report notes that a backlash of reactionary conservatism has come with progress for women’s equality. The report outlines two strategies to counter this backlash: organizing collective action and employing conversational techniques.
In positions of political power, women are effective at prioritizing women’s rights and social issues, such as climate justice, that disproportionately affect women. The pattern holds in the private sector as well: companies with female executives tend to promote more women to higher-level positions. The report emphasizes the impact of women in leadership roles—today, however, just fifteen women hold the highest political position in their countries.
Finally, the report points to technology as a powerful new tool for women’s empowerment. For instance, the #MeToo movement went viral and led to legislative changes and legal justice for survivors. There are many apps and websites that help protect and inform women. In developing economies, mobile phones give women access to employment, leveling economic gaps.
The Path to Progress
To accelerate advancements toward women’s equality, the report proposes seven pillars for eliminating gender based inequalities—including focusing on intersectional identities, working with the private sector, existing power structures, youth activists, and powerful men, and collecting more sex-disaggregated data to better understand factors that disproportionately affect women. The authors emphasize that COVID-19 has exacerbated inequities, and they call for strong institutions and multilateral cooperation to combat it.
With the COVID-19 pandemic threatening to push 47 million women under the poverty line, women’s rights matter more than ever. Beijing+25 presents many opportunities for pursuing change at all levels of society and government, but it makes clear that the need to take action is urgent. “We live at a watershed moment for women,” Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton writes in the introduction of the report, “We must resist and persist. And insist. We can wait no longer.”