Women's Views on News |
- Let’s celebrate Women’s Sport Week 2015
- Progress for women is progress for all
- Peace-keeping pilot launched
| Let’s celebrate Women’s Sport Week 2015 Posted: 29 May 2015 12:17 PM PDT
For some time now I've been just a small part of a committed, and ever-growing, group trying to raise awareness of women's sport and, at last, it seems it is becoming a hot topic in wider society. Of course, women's sport is just part of a larger equality agenda. But it is a significant part. Just 7 per cent of all sports media coverage is dedicated to women's sport. Between 2011 and 2013 women's sport accounted for only 0.4 per cent of all sports sponsorship. Only 18 per cent of qualified coaches are women, and women are vastly underrepresented on boards throughout sport. More shockingly than all that though; those women who do excel, take part, officiate or even just dare to stick their heads above the parapet are often subject to hideous sexism, prejudice and misogynist abuse. In an attempt to publicise and address these issues, Women in Sport (WIS), which used to be called the Women's Sport and Fitness Foundation (WSFF), is leading this first Women's Sport Week. It runs from 1-7 June and is a chance for everyone to get involved to help to raise the profile of women's sport and to try or watch something they – you – may not have considered before. If you play a sport, are part of a women's sports team, if you officiate, administrate or just watch, you can take part in the social media campaign surrounding #WSW2015; contribute via Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. On the WIS website there will be a guest blog each day of the week from some of the most famous names in women's sport, and there will be a daily competition with tickets to sporting events as prizes. The major broadcasters will also be doing their bit, with both the BBC and Sky on board, so watch out for more in-depth coverage of women's sport and women in sport this week. However, the print media, yet again, seems to be conspicuous by its absence. So if you're so inclined, why don't you challenge your favourite daily newspaper and ask them what they're doing to support Women's Sport Week? Other supporters include Sport England, British Rowing and BBC Get Inspired. As part of my contribution, I will be profiling some of the fantastic events coming up this summer. There is a huge summer of women's sport in the offing and I intend to whet your appetite this week with what is out there and then encourage you to get involved. From the Women's Football World Cup starting later this month in Canada, Women's Ashes from July, the Netball World Cup in August to the Solheim Cup in September, there's something for everyone. So check out womeninsport for more information and watch out for the hashtag #WSW2015 on social media. Above all, make your views known and get involved.  |
| Progress for women is progress for all Posted: 29 May 2015 12:06 PM PDT
The Deputy Executive Director of UN Women, Lakshmi Puri, was at the launch of UN Women's flagship report, 'Progress of the World's Women: Transforming Economies, Realizing Rights', in Geneva last week. Speaking at the event, which took place at the International Labour Organization (ILO) headquarters, she said: This report presents a transformative economic agenda for making women's rights a reality. Twenty years after the landmark Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, and at a time when the global community is defining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the post-2015 era, the consensus on the need to achieve gender equality and women's rights is stronger than ever before. Yet there is a disconnection between our common vision and tangible progress on the ground. Our world is out of balance. The world is both wealthier and more unequal today than at any time since the Second World War. We are recovering from a global economic crisis – but, as ILO analysis has repeatedly shown, that recovery has been jobless. Women are more educated than ever before, and yet globally, they are struggling to find work and make ends meet. Where women are employed, for the most part, they are in poorly paid, insecure occupations, like small-scale farming, urban street trading or as domestic workers, a sector in which 83 per cent of jobs are filled by women. Even in developed countries, many of the jobs that are being created are of poor quality, often temporary jobs that lack basic security. Why isn't the global economy fit for women? In Progress of the World's Women, we investigate what this failure means, and what its underlying causes are. Just as importantly, we envisage what an economy would look like, if it truly worked for women. If the economy worked for women, they would have equal access to opportunities and resources, to enable them to be economically independent, and to live a dignified life. The truth is, only half of women participate in the labour force compared to three quarters of men. In some developing regions, 75 per cent or more of women's employment is informal – jobs that are unprotected by labour laws and lack social protection. Globally women earn 24 per cent less than men. Indeed, in the same week as the global launch of Progress of the World's Women, none other than Pope Francis said about the gender pay gap: “the disparity is a pure scandal”. Needless to say, we share his outrage. If the economy worked for women, they would carry out their work without fear of sexual harassment or violence. Women's paid and unpaid work would be respected and valued. Right now, too many women face harassment and violence in their everyday work. Three quarters of women in management and higher professional positions in the European Union have experienced some form of sexual harassment in the workplace. If the economy worked for women, they would have an equal say in economic decision-making: they would have a voice in how time and money are spent in their households. They would be able to shape economic and social policies to fit the realities of their day-to-day lives. Too often, the reality is that economic decisions are made and resources allocated without women's voices being taken into account. Today, with this report, we are demanding nothing less than a new economic agenda. One that works for women, but will benefit all of society. What would this new agenda look like? There are three elements, which must work together. First, we must transform paid and unpaid work, to make it empowering for women. Second, we need social policies to support women, including family allowances and pensions. We need public services – water and sanitation, healthcare, and childcare services – designed with women's rights in mind Third, we need macroeconomic policies that support the realization of women's rights, by creating dynamic and stable economies, by creating good jobs and by raising the resources needed to finance vital public services. We should demand alternatives to the failed economic policies of the past, which have immiserated so many and held back the onward march of progress, for women and men. I know that for many people in this room, these issues – of decent work, social protection, and progressive macroeconomic policies – are close to your hearts. The recommendations that we make in the report largely speak to the rights that are already guaranteed by human rights treaties, including the Committee on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights (ICESCR). What this report shows is that in order for women to enjoy their rights in practice, to achieve substantive equality, we need policies in each of these areas – decent work, social policies and macroeconomic policies – to be informed and infused by gender analysis. We also show that policies in these three areas are intrinsically linked, and therefore must work together. Without the possibility of a decent job, women cannot work their way out of poverty; Without public services, like childcare or water and sanitation, it is difficult for women to get that decent job; Without the right macroeconomic policies, there will not be enough resources to pay for those public services that provide a lifeline for women and their families. To bring about the transformative change we so urgently need, we need to work together. Governments are responsible for realizing human rights, but they cannot do it alone. We need to work together as UN agencies to support governments to bring about the change we need to see. ILO has been at the forefront of the struggle for workers' rights for nearly a century. Our call to you is to ensure that women workers' rights are always at the top of your agenda. To close the gender gaps in paid employment, we need to support governments to recognize, reduce and redistribute women's unpaid care work; introduce and implement minimum wages; to ratify the domestic workers convention (to date 17 countries have taken this step, which is good, but not good enough); and to extend social protection to informal workers. The ILO's social protection floor initiative, which has been so critical in moving the social protection agenda forward, also needs to include a much stronger focus on social services, including care services, which are particularly important for women. We need to send a clearer signal that gender-based violence in the workplace is unacceptable, and that governments, trade unions and employers all need to take steps to end it. The proposed ILO convention on gender-based violence would fill an important normative gap here, and deserves our support. The private sector must play its part: as employers, by creating decent jobs for women, with equal pay and opportunities; and as businesses and wealth creators, by paying their fair share of taxation to finance essential social services from which they also benefit. Quality care services that are affordable expand women's choices and improve career prospects, but they also broaden the talent pool. Civil society must continue to play its role as 'watch dog', by placing women's rights on the agenda. Women's organizations have been an engine for change, but we also need trade unions and workers' movements to get on board. And for our part, global governance institutions, both the UN and the international financial and trade institutions, must support the realisation of women's rights. We need more policy space for countries to develop gender-responsive policy agendas; and fewer tax havens that rob countries of the resources they need to implement this agenda. Ultimately, upholding women's rights will not only make the economy work for women, but it will also benefit societies at large by creating a fairer and more sustainable future. Progress for women, she pointed out as she concluded, is progress for all.  |
| Posted: 29 May 2015 11:28 AM PDT
UN Women, in partnership with the Centre for United Nations Peacekeeping (CUNPK) in India, recently launched a pilot project which aims to train female military officers to prevent and address sexual and gender-based violence in armed conflict. This new two-week course builds on previous courses which targeted all peacekeeping personnel, both men and women. For the recent training in India, 32 female military officers from 24 countries took part in the Special Female Military Officers' Training Course, which also aims to address the serious shortage of women military personnel in United Nations peacekeeping missions across the world. "All of the militaries in the world are male-dominated; the majority of the leadership is male-dominated," Major Rachel Grimes, of the British Army, said. "So a young women thinking of this career may be put off because there doesn't seem to be an infrastructure in place to support her." Major Grimes served in the UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO) as an Intelligence Planning Officer. Her role was later extended as the UN Force Commander’s Child Protection and Gender Field Advisor. Women's participation in the security sector has been recognised as essential for the success of UN peacekeeping missions. However, the number of female military personnel deployed in current peacekeeping missions and military operations is very low. According to April 2015 figures, there were 2,840 female troops and military observers out of a total 94,620 personnel deployed in UN peacekeeping missions – representing three per cent. On average, only three per cent of military personnel in UN missions are women, most of whom are employed as support staff rather than in protection tasks. "Courses like these will bring more women forward and upward in the ranks to challenge the stereotypes and biases that have kept their numbers small and their roles limited," Rebecca Reichmann Tavares, Representative, UN Women Multi-Country Office for India, Bhutan, Maldives and Sri Lanka, said. Tavares also called upon the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations to make effective use of these trained women officers "who are a valuable resource for UN peace operations." Over the past four years, UN Women India has partnered with CUNPK to conduct 26 courses for UN peacekeepers – both men and women – on gender and sexual or gender-based violence prevention, as part of pre-deployment trainings. The Special Female Military Officers Course is the first on 'protection from violence' and the first specifically for women. The course is expected to be used as a model by national peacekeeping training centres in all countries that contribute troops to United Nations peace missions. It also seeks to create a critical mass of women military officers ready to be deployed on UN missions. A total of 100 women officers globally are expected to be trained during the first year. The 10-day technical course included training on a range of skills such as communication techniques for interacting with survivors, warning signs of conflict-related sexual violence, information/intelligence-gathering to identify risks, threats, and vulnerabilities, knowledge of child protection, and gender-responsive peacekeeping. The course included tactical training components – for example, the detection of early warning signals that might point to impending conflict, such as higher levels of domestic violence or withdrawal of adolescent girls from schools. Operational training emphasised, among other things, the importance of undertaking night patrols. The presence of female peacekeepers in marketplaces and in areas where women go to gather firewood has been shown to prevent cases of sexual and gender-based violence. And the inclusion of women in peace missions is also known to result in increased reporting of conflict-related sexual violence. One of the key elements of this two-week course is the prevention of and response to violations of women's rights. It includes a two-day scenario-based module on sexual violence in armed conflict – which uses videos, photos, stories and real examples of situations encountered in missions – focused on detecting, reporting, preventing and fighting sexual violence. Since 2011, more than 1,000 peacekeepers have taken this module in 18 countries. "The course is very important for the female officers," said Major Ivana Mara Ferreira Costa, from the Brazilian Military Support Section for UN Missions. "Not only are we recycling all the knowledge considering our experience on ground but … it has also opened our minds for the future, in terms of female inclusion in peacekeeping operations. "This course is important because it enables us to live in the situations that we usually have no idea can occur on ground." UN Women hopes that the course will be adopted by national and regional peacekeeping training institutions throughout the world. Following the success of the pilot course in New Delhi in March-April 2015, a second course will be conducted in South Africa in September 2015. The course is also expected to encourage governments of troop-contributing countries to include more women military experts in UN peacekeeping missions. "UN mandates include the critical responsibility of protection of civilians," Lt. Gen. Maqsood Ahmed, the military advisor to the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations, said. "An approach that does not involve women when 50 per cent of the civilian population is female cannot be called a comprehensive approach."  |
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