Sixty-first General Assembly

Informal Thematic Debate

Panel Discussion (PM)

PARTICIPANTS IN PANEL DISCUSSION CALL FOR STRENGTHENED UNITED NATIONS

BODY TO ENHANCE WOMEN’S PARTICIPATION IN DECISION-MAKING

 

Parallel to the General Assembly’s day-long thematic debate on gender equality and women’s empowerment, it held the first of two informal high-level panel discussions this afternoon, in which speakers called for the establishment of a fortified United Nations body that would pave the way for enhanced participation by women in decision-making at all levels of society.

Srilatha Batliwala, Board Chair of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), stressed the need for a new, well-resourced United Nations gender entity, saying women needed strong champions to address deeply embedded cultures of power.  With a budget of barely $65 million -- or less than 5 per cent of the budget of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) -- a powerful, well-resourced gender entity was urgently needed to combine both normative and operational roles.

However, she cautioned against gender-equality “magic bullets”, noting that, while the global commitment to poverty eradication and social justice seemed to have increased, so too had the belief that quick fixes could override the need for fundamental, long-term intervention.  Popular “magic bullets” like gender mainstreaming, non-empowering forms of microfinance and quotas for women in formal political systems had been reduced to formulas and mantras devoid of any transformative power.  Some had even proven dangerous for women, shifting on them greater burdens for political change and economic survival.

Echoing the call for a strengthened United Nations gender-equality structure, Mary Robinson, President of the Ethical Globalization Initiative and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, said the Organization needed a high-level agency, headed by an Under-Secretary-General and endowed with a significant budget and powers.

Describing her experiences as President of Ireland and High Commissioner for Human Rights, she said that, as “a President who was a woman and a woman who was a President”, she had sought to break the traditional mould, giving personal attention to her constituency.  As High Commissioner, she had tried to “change the imprint” of that Office, which had been “completely gender insensitive” upon her arrival.

Opening the panel discussion, General Assembly President Sheikha Haya Rashed Al Khalifa (Bahrain), said that, despite global political support for the fundamental rights of women and men to participate equally in decision-making, there remained a wide gap between de jure and de facto equality.  Women were poorly represented at the higher levels of decision-making in both public and private sectors.  The real issue was implementation; even the United Nations, while it had made progress, had not achieved a 50-50 gender balance in senior positions by the year 2000.  Gender equality need not be seen as a long-term aspiration, but as an immediately attainable goal.

In several rounds of discussion, speakers acknowledged that, while progress had been made at the international level, women at the grass roots had seen little change and may have experienced added economic and political burdens.  Women, whether elected or appointed to decision-making positions, must reclaim the right to make decisions in the interest of women.  As the only democratic, inclusive international body, the United Nations could do more to move the issue of gender equality forward.  The challenges before the Organization in the twenty-first century included the further development of norms, the coordination of funding and the creation of mechanisms to ensure coherence and promote the advancement of women.

Panel moderator Malika Dutt, Executive Director of Breakthrough, noted that today’s unprecedented discussion, organized by the General Assembly President, was one small example of what could happen when women were in leadership.  While many commitments had been made around the theme of gender equality in the past decades, vast gaps remained between rhetoric and reality.  Rather than reiterating the promises of the past, new wisdom and greater analysis were needed on the way forward.

Also participating in the panel discussion were Beatriz Paredes of the Fundacion Colosio, Mexico; Pregaluxmi Govender, a former member of the South African Parliament; and Anders Johnsson, Secretary-General of the Inter-Parliamentary Union.

The General Assembly will hold its second panel discussion on women’s empowerment, including microfinance, at 10 a.m. tomorrow, 7 March.

Panel Discussion

General Assembly President SHEIKHA HAYA RASHED AL KHALIFA (Bahrain), opening the discussion, said that, despite global political support for the fundamental rights of women and men to participate equally in decision-making, the gap between de jure and de facto equality remained wide.  Women were particularly poorly represented at higher levels of decision-making in both the public and private sectors.  The real issue was implementation; even the United Nations, while it had made progress, had not achieved a 50-50 gender balance in senior positions by 2000.  Gender equality should not be seen as a long-term aspiration, but as an immediately attainable goal.  The African Union had shown what political will and leadership could do, by achieving, virtually overnight, a 50-50 gender balance at the highest levels.

Panel moderator MALIKA DUTT, Executive Director of Breakthrough, noted that today’s unprecedented discussion was only one small example of what could happen when women were in leadership.  Everyone was aware of the many commitments made over the past decades around the theme of gender equality.  Yet, in 2007, vast gaps remained between rhetoric and reality.  Rather than reiterating the promises of the past, the discussion would, hopefully, shed new light and wisdom and provide greater analysis on how to move forward.

The first of today’s panellists, ANDERS JOHNSSON, Secretary-General of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), said the world was nowhere near the 50-50 proportion of men and women in power and, if that situation continued, it would be the year 2077 “by the time we get there”.

He said recent statistics prepared by IPU showed that several regions, including the Gulf countries, had introduced significant improvements aimed at promoting women to positions of power.  However, no region had reached the critical mass of 30 per cent defined at Beijing, and certainly not the goal of 50-50 gender representation.  Some 19 countries had reached the 30 per cent goal, including several countries emerging from conflict.  For example, South Africa and Burundi were among the best performers and some Northern European States were doing well as a result of tradition, culture and education.  Latin America as a region had made the best use of measures to promote women’s equality through their electoral systems.  In that connection, it was important to introduce quotas in parliaments.

Politics was still largely run by men, he said, adding that, when political parties were vying for posts, they tended to place male candidates at the top of their respective lists.  However, without support from political parties, women found it difficult to be elected.  People’s attitudes were important and, if the population was comfortable with women in elected positions, female candidates were more likely to be elected.  In Sweden, the percentage of women in Parliament exceeded 40 per cent, but a recent survey had shown that a large degree of gender discrimination was still obvious there.  As a result, a 10-point programme had been put in place to address the situation.  If that was the situation in Sweden, which had set a positive example for many years, one could only imagine what it was like elsewhere.

PREGALUXMI GOVENDER, former Member of Parliament from South Africa, described her country as a model, saying its Constitution provided for gender equality.  A 30 per cent quota had been introduced for the election lists of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress, and the country had established a parliamentary committee on the status of women.  Women also participated in the work of many other parliamentary committees.  Phenomenal changes in legislation had been introduced in the areas of reproductive choice, domestic violence, minority status of women in customary law, child maintenance and women’s rights in the workplace.  There was also a national budget commitment to develop gender-sensitive data and policy in every area, as well as increases in socio-economic spending.

Yet, after all those changes, many women could not find employment and lived below the poverty line, while bearing the brunt of gender violence and HIV/AIDS, she said.  Women, whether elected or appointed into decision-making positions, or lacking access to wealth or positional power, must begin by reclaiming the right to make decisions in the interest of women.  Key decisions were often manipulated outside official decision-making structures, and decision-making in Government was shaped by the need to appease those who held economic power.  Organizations established to advance the rights of women and gender equality were generally underresourced, with little power to impact crucial decisions directly.  Generally set up to fail, those structures –- and the women in them –- often ended up playing catch-up.  Worse, they often fought each other for resources, while the position of women continued to get worse in many areas of life.

Early into South Africa’s democracy, the country’s macroeconomic policies had promised significant growth rates and job creation, but none of the stated goals had been met, she said.  The focus was on attracting direct investment and reducing taxes for the rich.  The jobs created were mainly in low-paid vulnerable work, and the numbers of jobs did not match the increase in the labour force.  The result was increasing levels of unemployment numbers of working poor, particularly women, despite the democratic promise.  That was not a unique story, but there was hope.  For decision-making to have a real impact, women must find ways to subvert the patriarchy, so as to build the world of their dreams.

BEATRIZ PAREDES, Fundacion Colosio, said it was not only a matter of women’s participation but also their commitment to gender equality and the transformation of women’s participation in building a more just society.  There was a need to address the disconnection between women’s activism and global policies.  Today’s global economic policy failed to provide real options to the world’s people, especially women, who faced the realities of daily life.  Macroeconomics did not deal with everyday life.  Another option was increasing the critical mass of women with a vision for the exercise of real political power.

Women’s integration and leadership changed their everyday reality, as well as their power, she said, adding that, as a member of one of Mexico’s oldest parties, she could say democracy provided women with opportunity.  There was a need to be clear on the agenda for women’s empowerment; it was not simply a question of empowering the elite, but of concrete commitment to women in large social groups.  Numbers alone, however, did not represent power.

SRILATHA BATLIWALA, Board Chair, Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), said that, while the global commitment to poverty eradication and social justice had seemingly increased, so had the belief that “magic bullets” and quick fixes could override the need for more fundamental but painful longer-term interventions.  Popular magic bullets included gender mainstreaming, non-empowering forms of microfinance and quotas for women in formal political systems.  While good ideas, those magic bullets had, in practice, been reduced to formulas and mantras devoid of any transformative power.

Some of those approaches had been dangerous for women, she added.  There was growing evidence that today’s magic bullets were shifting the greater burden for real transformation, political change and economic survival onto women themselves.  While they had achieved formulaic equality in terms of law, they had only created the push factors or enabling conditions.  The international community had not focused on processes that would address the invisible, embedded cultures of power and privilege.  There had also been a trend in the last 20 years of defunding processes considered too slow and difficult to measure.  More resources had been taken away from programmes that had made a difference on the ground.  Resources were needed to enable women to experiment at the grass-roots level in creating new cultures and forms of power.

On the role of the United Nations, she stressed the need for an empowered new gender entity.  Women needed strong champions for a new phase of gender-equality work that would address the deeply embedded culture of power.  In other words, support was needed for the kinds of work in which the magic bullet people were too impatient to invest.  The United Nations gender-equality architecture currently received some $65 million, or just 5 per cent of the budget of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).  It had taken the efforts of the women’s movement to push for the creation of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) 30 years ago, and the United Nations system needed a more powerful, well-resourced gender entity to combine both a normative and an operational role in support of innovative gender-justice work.

MARY ROBINSON, President, Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, stressed the necessity to consider the real meaning of leadership and the way in which women wanted to exercise it.  Her election as President of the traditionally Catholic Ireland, to a large extent, had been the result of a large number of women voting outside the family tradition.  As “a President who was a woman and a woman who was a President”, she had sought to break the traditional mould, giving personal attention to her constituency.

She recalled that, a few weeks after her election, she had received numerous invitations to some “big events”, but had chosen to attend functions traditionally deemed to be “of not sufficient importance to warrant the attention of the President”.  Later, as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, she had sought to “change the imprint” of that Office, which was “completely gender insensitive” at the time of her arrival, she said.  With only 2 per cent of United Nations budget going towards human rights in the 1990s, she had spent a good deal of her time “going where the victims are” and trying to make their voices heard.

As far as women’s leadership was concerned, she said she was interested in transformative change -- doing things that could make a difference.  It was important to make women elected to positions of power more visible.  The United Nations needed a high-level agency, presided over by an Under-Secretary-General, with a significant budget and powers, as recommended by the High-Level Panel on System-Wide Coherence.

Mr. JOHNSSON agreed on the necessity to transform the process of the exercise of power, but that question could not be left exclusively to Governments.  Somebody else had to take a leadership role, as well.  For example, parliaments were undertaking to do that in many countries.  Advancing gender equality had been on the international agenda for many years and many important changes had taken place in that time.  For instance, today, the Assembly was holding a political discourse that would have been impossible some years ago.

Ms. PAREDES said new paradigms included universal international conventions and other instruments.  At the same time, it was important to recognize the national dimensions of gender issues.  The United Nations leadership role needed nurturing, as did those of other international organizations playing their part in designing national policies.

Speakers in the ensuing debate shared their national experiences and outlined the main challenges for the advancement of women, which included the lack of resources and expertise, negative stereotypes and the lack of data on the real situation of women.

As for the role of the United Nations, several speakers agreed that the Organization now found itself at a new stage, whereby it must move from raising awareness of women’s issues to being instrumental in achieving real women’s empowerment.  United Nations entities should not only have general mandates, but also sufficient expertise to achieve the advancement of women.

Speakers also stressed the need to recognize power dynamics, with one participant saying the situation often reminded her of “shifting sands”: as women moved into positions of power, the power moved elsewhere.

The question of women’s leadership was closely related to the issue of social transformation, another speaker said.  Countries must develop strong democracies and promote “new elites”, including women.

Another delegate said that, while issues of gender equality had been coming to the forefront, the role of women’s movements had become less prominent in recent years.  While more women found themselves in positions of power, elected women were heavily dependent on the leading party, which often led to unwelcome compromises.  Also, the decisions reached at the international level did not always translate into reality on the ground.

Ms. ROBINSON, responding to the discussion, said there were different ways to exercise power, and accountability tools were needed to address the issue of “shifting sands”, as was greater interaction between civil society and the women’s movement.  The United Nations should play an expert role by providing leadership at the local and national levels.

Ms. BATLIWALA, also addressing the question of shifting power, noted that serious numbers of women had gained power, including in political systems and trade unions.  In Karnataka state, south India, one of the first local governments to introduce quotas, the quota for women in political parties had shifted from 25 to 33 per cent.  Women had initially been greeted with suspicion and disbelief, but now, they were seen as the only honest politicians able to get things done.  When women stayed the course, they gained power.

In the discussion that followed, several speakers agreed on the need to introduce quotas in order to enhance women’s political participation.  Moreover, minor changes to the law could have a powerful impact on society.  The poor political representation of women in Latin America was not due to a lack of interest, one speaker said, but to the poor distribution of wealth and the rampant corruption in political parties.  Another speaker asked whether statutory and legislative measures undermined grass-roots efforts to empower women.

Regarding the United Nations gender architecture, one speaker asked for concrete suggestions to ensure gender parity in the Organization.  Several speakers said deeply patriarchal value systems were the real impediment to the entry of women into decision-making positions.   While the cold war had ended, the “cold war” between men and women had not.

CORA WEISS, the Hague Appeal for Peace, noted that the Secretary-General’s just released statement on International Women’s Day contained nice words -- including his call for the full implementation of Security Council resolution 1325 (2000) on women, peace and security -- but no real action.  Was it too late too ask him to resubmit that statement?

Patriarchal values, not men, were the enemy, she said, pointing out that, as the meeting took place, 33 women had been arrested in Tehran.  The greatest violence against women and girls was perpetrated during times of war.  A culture of war was becoming frighteningly acceptable.  If the world could abolish slavery, it could also abolish war.

A speaker noted that much progress had been made at the international level, but asked whether that meant women at the grass roots were better off.  The fact that gender-equality issues remained at the centre of attention was welcome, but one also got the impression that the same points were repeated over and over again.  As the only democratic, inclusive international body, the United Nations could do a lot to move the gender-equality question forward.  It should also look to other international, civil society and non-governmental organizations to advance the status of women further.

Several speakers agreed that the challenges before the United Nations in the twenty-first century included the further development of norms, the coordination of funding and the creation of mechanisms to ensure coherence and promote the advancement of women.  A delegate called on the Organization and its organs to set an example by creating motivation for Member States to put more women in decision-making positions.

Ms. BATLIWALA, quoting Mahatma Ghandi, urged the United Nations: “Be the change that you are recommending to others.”

Another participant said that one of the reasons why many in civil society had lost faith in the United Nations was the international community’s failure to implement its own decisions.  The Organization should insist on their implementation and hold Member States accountable in that regard.

Ms. PAREDES called for a meeting of United Nations bodies responsible for implementing various human rights conventions, in order to evaluate compliance with those instruments, and emphasized the importance of increased training on women’s issues.

Ms. BATLIWALA and Ms. ROBINSON also spoke about the accountability of various agencies in relation to the implementation of human rights standards developed over the years.

Ms. BATLIWALA said the United Nations should devise more effective ways to play one of its more traditional roles of “disciplining” and holding other multilateral and global institutions, including financial ones, to account.

A speaker underscored the imperative of creating conditions to make women’s participation meaningful.  In that respect, violence against women was a participation issue and should not be ignored.  There was need to devote energy and resources to addressing that problem.

Among other issues addressed in the debate was the role of existing “women’s bodies”, including UNIFEM, the need to reduce military budgets to free resources for social development, strengthening the General Assembly and measures to promote political will on the part of Governments.

Ms. GOVENDER said that, to “the hate, the greed, the fear” of traditional power, women should respond by redefining the power as “the power of love”; not as “some wishy-washy gush”, but as power within themselves and each other, from which they would emerge with courage to advance the interests of the poorest women, through their positions, access and power in decision-making structures.

Ms. ROBINSON also emphasized “the importance of numbers”, saying the more women were in positions of power, the more they could accomplish.  Quotas were also important in increasing the numbers of their representation.  “Who has got the power” was very relevant to such issues as HIV/AIDS, poverty and gender-related violence.

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For information media • not an official record