On 25 October, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) launched its General Recommendation 40, on the equal and inclusive representation of women in decision-making systems. The General Recommendation culminates a process that began in February of 2023, and that aims to provide States with guidance, based on the premise that the achievement of gender equality is a fundamental human right requiring systemic action and that the ‘long-term and structural absence of women globally from decision-making systems deprives the world of the potential of half its population.’
That absence is substantiated by facts, and no sector is spared from this systematic lack of representation, from the international sphere, to different levels of government, and positions of economic influence. For example, less than 10% of speakers during the General Debate at this year’s UN General Assembly, held in September, were women. The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres has called on ‘male-dominated political and economic establishments around the world’ to step up action to achieve gender parity among United Nations senior leadership. The imbalance is reflected across the board, including at the UN. For example, while women are relatively well represented as heads of UN agencies – out of the 21 main UN agencies, and other international entities like the World Bank and IMF, 9 are women (leading UN Women, UNICEF, UNFPA, UNEP, UNESCO, UNCTAD, WFP, WMO, and ITU) – across the UN’s 79 years of existence, a woman has never held the position of UN Secretary-General.
Notwithstanding, this endemic imbalance is not specific to the international arena – it trickles down to all levels of government. According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), globally, in 2023, women represented just 26.9% of members of parliament, and only in three countries – Rwanda, Cuba, and Nicaragua – did women represent over half of the seats in lower or single chambers of the legislature. At the local level, UN Women data shows that only in three countries – Antigua and Barbuda, Iceland, and Bolivia – do women represent 50% or higher of elected seats.
Similarly, in the economic sphere and in civil services, women are routinely blocked from climbing the professional ladder: for example, only 8% of CEOs across the largest 500 US companies are women; in G20 countries, women represent just 29.3% of senior leaders of national civil services, while legal barriers in many countries prevent women from accessing employment, pushing them to the informal economy, where women are over-represented (over 90% of women work in the informal sector in low-income countries). Pervasive gender wage gaps (current estimates show that it will take 143 years to achieve full wage parity) are also both a cause and a consequence of the lack of representation of women in the spaces where decisions are made. The list of disparities could go on, but the point is clear: social and economic inequalities affecting women’s economic empowerment are not happenstance, they are the result of longstanding legislative and policy choices, rooted in patriarchal systems, that need systemic change. CEDAW’s latest General Recommendation acknowledges this need for fundamental transformation and offers several paths forward to undertake it.
The General Recommendation relies on a definition of ‘equal and inclusive representation’ as 50:50 parity between women and men in all their diversity, in terms of equal access to and equal power within decision-making systems, which encompass the political, public, economic, and private spheres and, importantly, digital spaces. In the General Recommendation, the Committee explains the systematic underrepresentation of women in peace and political stability efforts; sustainable, inclusive and human rights-based economies; climate change and disaster risk reduction; technological developments and the rise of AI; and multilateral systems and governance. In order to overcome that imbalance, the Committee makes a very comprehensive set of practical and specific recommendations, including the following:
- Introducing legislative changes to institutionalise 50:50 parity in decision-making and collecting disaggregated data to monitor progress;
- Enabling voter registration and turnout for women, by assisting them in obtaining national IDs, and ensuring the systematic birth registration of girls;
- Establishing parity requirements and gender rotation systems for senior leadership in business, and alternating between female and male candidates in elections, via vertical and horizontal parity lists;
- Conducting gender audits of parliaments, government offices and local and regional councils, assessing their gender-responsiveness and parity;
- Engaging with religious leaders to address tensions in the interpretation of religious norms vis-à-vis human rights;
- Integrating interdisciplinary human rights and women’s rights expertise to correct biased AI models, conducting impact assessments throughout every stage of development and dissemination of these technologies, from training data to algorithmic development;
- Establishing complaints mechanisms and investigating GBV, particularly in political and decision-making spheres, with ensuing redress schemes;
- Institutionalising consultations and capacity-building for women and girls’ rights organisations and women human rights defenders;
- Legislating paid parental leave on an equal footing for women and men;
- Institutionalising parity laws for the nomination and selection for positions in international and multilateral organisations, COPs, tribunals, development finance institutions, and regional institutions.
While these are non-exhaustive examples of the Committee’s far-reaching recommendations, they illustrate the ideals guiding the General Recommendation, namely, that obstacles to gender equality in decision-making have a cascading effect on other human rights, as different civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights are severely whenever women’s voices are not heard at the table.
The human rights mechanisms have long pushed for greater gender equality in leadership and decision-making. Around 4,700 recommendations relate to SDG target 5.5, which specifically considers this issue. Of these, 52% have been issued by the Treaty Bodies, 42% in the context of the UPR, and just close to 5% by Special Procedures. Unsurprisingly, amongst Treaty Bodies, it is CEDAW that has issued the most recommendations (1,705), followed by the Committee on Persons with Disabilities (CRPD, 245 recommendations), and the Human Rights Committee (CCPR, 201). While this is perhaps to be expected, it raises questions of why more parts of the U human rights mechanisms are not routinely engaging with women’s representation. Even though this is first and foremost a question of equality of opportunities, access to resources, equal sharing of responsibilities and power, and ultimately the fact that women’s rights are human rights, there is considerable evidence also showcasing the benefits of having women at the table across different types of decision-making: from increasing the chances of success of peace agreements, to bringing effective perspectives in emergency situations such as the management of public health crises, to managing biases in new technologies in order to combat discrimination in tools like AI systems.
The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, which turns 30 next year, includes women in power and decision-making as one of twelve strategic objectives (including also poverty, education, health, VAW, armed conflict, economy, media, and environment), and calls upon governments to act so that men and women share power and responsibility ‘at home, in the workplace, and in the wider national and international communities.’ At a time of serious global political, social, and economic challenges, the roadmap provided in the General Recommendation reminds States of their obligations to provide for the full participation of women across all fields, and provides essential guidance as to how that much-needed paradigm shift in governance can be secured.
Image credit: European Commission KnowSDGs
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