Women’s Day: gender equality today for a sustainable future

For the UN Women Regional Office for the Americas and the Caribbean

March 8, International Women’s Day, is a milestone that allows the progress made by women and the feminist movement to be placed at the center of public debate, but above all the pending challenges to guarantee the human rights of women and Gender equality. In this framework, the pandemic has deepened the existing gender gaps in Latin America and the Caribbean, and we begin 2022 facing serious inequalities.

The pandemic reduced the participation of women in the region in the labor market. In 2021, according to ILO data, more than 13 million women saw their jobs disappear due to the pandemic in Latin America and the Caribbean. The overwhelming departure of women from the labor force represents an 18-year setback in the progress made by women according to ECLAC data from 2021.

Poverty and extreme poverty are at levels of more than two decades ago. According to ECLAC data from 2021, at the end of 2020, around 118 million Latin American women were in poverty, 23 million more than in 2019. That year, the regional average of women without their own income reached 28%, while which for men was 10.4%. This means that nearly a third of women in the region depend on others for their livelihood, making them economically vulnerable and dependent on income earners, who are typically men.

Among the poorest households, single mothers are overrepresented and tend to be women who were teenage mothers, with limited access to education and training and, in general, with precarious and informal jobs. While rural women live in situations of extreme job insecurity and isolation. According to the ILO, in 2019, 85.7% of workers employed in the agricultural sector were informal, while in the non-agricultural sector the informality rate was 65.8%. In the case of women, the proportion of informality is higher than that of men, highlighting that in the agricultural sector the rate has reached 91.6%.

Women continue to face hours of burden of care at home in very difficult conditions. In the region, women still spend more than three times as much time on unpaid care and domestic work as men. These differences are even greater for women with lower incomes, who spend an average of 46 hours per week in unpaid work.

Different forms of violence against women and girls have also intensified, especially in the home. Sexual harassment and other forms of violence against women continue to occur on the street, in public spaces and on social media. According to ECLAC, an average of at least twelve women die daily in the region for the mere fact of being women and on average one in three has suffered physical and/or sexual violence in an intimate relationship throughout her life. .

For this reason, the best predictor of a country’s level of fragility is not wealth, the type of government or the religion practiced by the majority of its inhabitants, but rather its gender equality indexes.

Post-COVID-19 recovery

In this framework, a successful recovery also implies ensuring the participation of women in all stages of the response. Not only because of a commitment to fair representation, but because of the overwhelming evidence that when women participate in decision-making spaces, the benefits for the population as a whole are multiple.

The recovery must also take into account the close links between gender, security and climate change. The consequences of climate change can generate drivers of insecurity for women, including increased exposure to gender-based violence, increased food insecurity, as well as barriers to accessing resources and increased risk of forced displacement. This is why it is necessary that mitigation and adaptation measures incorporate climate change, that they contemplate the full participation of women and a peace-building and gender perspective.

To rebuild our societies, it is essential to advance the economic, physical and political autonomy of women, strengthening their role in the economy, development and social transformation, strengthening the leading role of women’s organizations in the communities, and in the design , implementation and evaluation of public policies.

The 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals are the roadmap to which governments and the entire international community have committed. At a global level, one of the most urgent challenges we face continues to be climate change and disaster risk reduction, which forces us to seek solutions taking into account the transformative power of women in all their diversity.

For this reason, it is necessary for more and more women and feminist and women’s organizations in Latin America and the Caribbean to participate systematically in public policies for production, sustainable development and response to climate change. (OR)