Given the current pace of change, we will have to wait for around 81 years to achieve gender parity at workplace

Even in an era of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), no country has yet been able to achieve gender equality. UN Women has also raised an alarm: given the current pace of change, we will have to wait for around 81 years to achieve gender parity at workplace, more than 75 years to reach equal remuneration between men and women for work of equal value, and more than 30 years to reach gender balance in decision-making. If this wake-up call is not enough, I wonder what will be.

The 2030 target of meeting the 17 SDGs includes two goals, namely, Goal 5 (Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls) and Goal 8 (Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all) that directly deal with interlinkages between gender and trade. There are several reports that document the crucial need to enhance efforts to economically empower women through trade. McKinsey Global Institute estimates that if men and women are able to participate in the economy on equal footing, the global annual gross domestic product could be increased by US $28 billion by 2025. While such future prospects may be challenging, it is not impossible to achieve.

With expectant eyes turned to the ongoing 14th session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Nairobi, Kenya from July 17-22, it will be interesting to see how governments come up with actionable goals on gender and trade and how they propose practical measures to achieve those goals. According to UNCTAD, the event is going to be “tackling the factors holding down global trade growth—one of the most urgent issues affecting the world economy today.”

Current scenario
Ensuring women’s human rights in general and economic rights in particular requires deeper interventions in the complex and evolving gender relations on one hand and changing economic paradigms on the other. There is growing body of research which documents trade’s gendered implications. For example, UNCTAD’s seven-country-study—encompassing Rwanda, Angola, Lesotho,  Gambia,  Cape Verde, Bhutan and Uruguay—shows that gender considerations have only rarely been taken into account in trade and macro-economic policy.

In every county, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) play a vital role in creating employment opportunities and contributing to economic growth. According to the evidence from a survey of 20 countries by the International Trade Centre (ITC), women most often own or manage small companies, while men tend to work in large ones. Women-owned and managed businesses also employ more women workers and are often at the bottom of the value chain.

While both men and women face common barriers to trade, women face greater barriers due to the cultural and legal constraints imposed on them. As also evidenced in the World Bank’s Women Business and the Law 2016 report, 90 percent of the 173 economies surveyed had at least one law impeding women’s economic opportunities. Cultural gender stereotypes add to the burden of women having to shoulder unpaid care work besides enacting their reproductive role. This limits women’s time for productive work and restricts their mobility. In addition, women’s limited access to education, skills, training, information, networks and productive resources like land and finance explain lower level of women’s participation in international trade.
The situation in South Asian region mirrors those described above, as also explained in the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)-commissioned field surveys of six South Asian countries: Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The study looked at the barriers women-owned and led micro, small and medium enterprises faced in engaging in business and subregional trade. According to the study, women entrepreneurs had limited access to productive resources, low level of education, even though they did most of the manual work and were on a survival-oriented stage of the enterprise spectrum. This happened even though they aspired to move to a growth-oriented stage.

A research by the South Asia Watch on Trade Economics and Environment (SAWTEE), focusing on Nepal, fed into the above study. It surveyed 15 women entrepreneurs and 52 employees involved in the production of two products: Allo (Himalayan nettle) and Lokta (natural fibre) in five districts. As per the survey, women entrepreneurs find it difficult to hire women workers due to women’s limited mobility resulting from security concerns and time constraints.
Women entrepreneurs themselves face restricted mobility and have limited know-how in business. This has implications on the growth of business, locking women entrepreneurs in small-scale production, which often does not meet international standards and quality. This is caused due to limited access to training opportunities available for the women workers who are often found to be involved in laborious and time-consuming production process.

Prospects ahead
There are several strategies that all governments including the Government of Nepal can undertake to develop inclusive trade policies and practices. A few policy recommendations, in this connection, include: One, conducting gender analysis of trade policy and further exploring possibilities to ensure policy coherence with other policies such as agriculture, industry, infrastructure, labour and social needs. Two, collecting gender disaggregated data on employment in different sectors of the economy, identifying gendered barriers to trade in that particular sector and enacting economic reforms to remove them.

Three, ensuring that agriculture, industry and services sector strategies are gender sensitive and that there are adequate and effective mechanisms to involve women in the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation stages of economic development projects.

To conclude, although gender issues appear in the pre-conference negotiating text of the Preparatory Committee for the fourteenth session of UNCTAD, if policy-makers really have the aim of “reigniting global trade in support of inclusive economic growth and poverty eradication,” they should show the political will and full commitment to unlock women’s potential in trade. In order to develop an inclusive and transformative feminist trade agenda, governments must thus strive towards economic and social structural changes. Let us wait and see what comes out of the 14th UNCTAD session.

The author is a development consultant based in Geneva

 
• women
 
• trade