Economic empowerment, targeted legislation and cultural shifts are required to create gender-just societies
It’s been nearly 50 years of celebrating International Women’s Day but the gains for women have been incremental at best and sometimes just plain regressive.
Women across Indo-Pacific countries continue to bear the brunt of misogyny, violence and sexism at home, in public and the workplace. UN Women reports that the gender pay gap stands at 20 percent—meaning women workers earn 80 per cent of what their male counterparts do. This gap is even greater for women of colour, migrant women, those with disabilities, and women with children. Australia’s recent report on pay inequity is a reminder that economic equality remains distant, even in developed economies.
Beyond celebrating women’s achievements, International Women’s Day offers the opportunity to address obstacles in the path to gender equality through collective action. This year’s theme “Invest in Women: Accelerate Progress” is a timely reminder to examine not just overt but insidious forms of women’s disempowerment: economic, social and political.
The gender pay gap, the unchanging nature of women’s care burden, roadblocks to leadership roles and healthcare access, sexual violence, domestic abuse, precarious working conditions, lack of social protection and inequity that carries into old age all coalesce to deny women their rights to full lives.
Women continue to pay the ‘marriage and motherhood penalty’ which affects incomes, promotions and employment, largely due to the time spent on unpaid care work—childcare, elder care, cooking and domestic tasks—as compared to men. In most countries, women’s increased presence in the workforce has not been accompanied by men sharing the burden of care work.
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Due to their care burden, women are more likely to join informal work in both developed and developing economies. This requires more stringent policies around decent pay, enhanced labour legislation and greater gender sensitivity in workplaces. This is true for all nations, but especially for developing economies, where domestic work is largely unregulated and highly precarious.
For domestic work to be seen as “work” cuts across economic and social considerations for both paid and unpaid domestic work. In workplaces, this would translate into more robust labour legislation that includes maternity benefits, insurance, equal pay and health and safety considerations. At the household level, it means reducing the disproportionate burden of care work on women.
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