UK Gender And Development Network’s Submission.pdf

The UK Gender and Development Network (GADN) Women’s Economic Justice (WEJ) working group’s submission to the World Bank Group’s Gender Strategy in July 2015 emphasized the need for a more holistic approach to achieving substantive gender equality within the context of reducing poverty and promoting equality. The group welcomed the World Bank Group’s concept note on ‘Promoting Gender Equality to Reduce Poverty and Boost Shared Prosperity’ but expressed concerns that the focus on women’s economic empowerment was limited in its scope and analysis.

The WEJ working group argued that the draft of the Gender Strategy neglected core social determinants of gender equality, such as health, education, autonomy, and freedom from violence, which are not only women’s human rights but also impact on the economic opportunities of women worldwide. The group highlighted that the current approach to women’s economic empowerment, which focuses on integrating women into the market economy and raising individual women’s income, has not increased women’s economic empowerment substantially.

Instead, the group recommended that the World Bank Group adopts an approach to substantive gender equality that considers not only the differential economic opportunities and assets available to women and girls but also the structural inequalities that deny women the realization of their full range of rights. This includes inequalities across health, sexual and gender-based violence, education, unpaid care responsibility, macroeconomic policies, and women’s participation and decision-making.

The WEJ working group identified several policies, approaches, and programs that have helped remove economic and social constraints to women and girls and that the World Bank Group strategy could learn from. These include increasing women’s economic opportunities by recognizing, reducing, and redistributing women’s responsibility of unpaid care work, investing in social infrastructure, essential public services, and care-sensitive social protection, and promoting family-friendly policies, maternity leave, and public care services.

Examples of successful programs include community day care in Guatemala City, which increased the income of mothers by 30 per cent and made them more likely to be employed in the formal sector, and a pre-school program in Argentina, which increased women’s employment by 7–14 per cent. The group also highlighted the need to tackle social norms that see the domain of care work as a women’s work and invest in low-carbon decentralized energy and other time-saving technologies to reduce time spent on care and its drudgery elements.