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Some say that sexual orientation and gender identity are sensitive issues. I understand. Like many of my generation, I did not grow up talking about these issues. But I learned to speak out because lives are at stake, and because it is our duty under the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to protect the rights of everyone, everywhere. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to the Human Rights Council, 7 March 2012
Introduction
Despite huge progress in gender equality, both economic and social through the past five decades, social barriers between genders is a devastating actuality. Currently transcending merely just male and female roles, transgendered people face huge discrimination and difficulty in their everyday lives. There has been persistent debate on the rights and roles of women in todays world, including measures to alleviate poverty (where women are still vastly over-represented) and create opportunity especially in countries with highly patriarchal systems. Entrenched in the problem is the socially constructed gender norms that often lead women to be overrepresented in certain fields, and highly unrepresented in both government and high positions of power. Segregation of occupation is a growing problem, as it contributes to the still wide pay gap between men and women as well as entrenching power male-dominated power structures. Furthermore, traditional masculine stereotypes which encourage men to have more sexual partners have contributed to the spread of HIV through increased transmission and missing out on HIV prevention education.
The United Nations defines violence against women as "any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or mental harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life." In areas where womens status is lower, fear can lead to lack of reporting as well as accessing treatment after traumatic injury. A combination of extreme poverty and traditional biases against women concocts a vicious cycle of gender discrimination and gender inequality that wrongly justifies tragedies such as high statistics of neglect towards young girls as well as high frequencies of infanticide and sex-selective abortion.
Nations Development Programme, as written in its 1997 Human Development Report. Almost 50 years earlier, in 1948, the United Nations General Assembly had adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which specified that everyone, regardless of sex, was entitled to the same rights and freedoms. The 1997 Human Development Report, as well
as every Human Development Report that followed, has highlighted that each country falls short of achieving that goal. The severity of the shortfall varies by country; Nordic
countries such as Sweden, Norway and Iceland, for example, are routinely hailed as having the smallest gender gaps. In the developing world, however, women face unfairness that can be hard to fathom. 2011 Human Development Report The disadvantages facing women and girls are a major source of inequality. All too often, women and girls are discriminated against in health, education and the labour marketwith negative repercussions for their freedoms. Thus, the UN has introduced a new measure of these inequalities built on the same framework as the HDI and the IHDI to better expose
differences in the distribution of achievements between women and men. Inequality Index shows that:
The Gender
Gender inequality varies tremendously across countriesthe losses in achievement due to gender inequality (not directly comparable to total inequality losses because different variables are used) range from 17 percent to 85 percent. The Netherlands
tops the list of the most gender-equal countries, followed by Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland. Countries with unequal distribution of human development also experience high inequality between women and men, and countries with high gender inequality also experience unequal distribution of human development. Among the countries doing
very badly on both fronts are Central African Republic, Haiti and Mozambique.
which captures the loss of achievement, within a country, due to gender inequality, and uses three dimensions to do so: reproductive health, empowerment, and labor market participation. The dimensions are captured in one synthetic index, as to account for joint significance. According to the UNDP, none of the measures in the dimensions pertain to the country's development and therefore a less-developed country can perform well if gender inequality is low. The UNDP considers the dimensions complimentary in that inequality in one Therefore, the GII captures association
across dimensions, making the index association-sensitive, and ensuring that high achievement in one dimension does not compensate for low achievement in another dimension.
In every developing region except the CIS, men outnumber women in paid employment
Women are largely relegated to more vulnerable forms of employment Women are over-represented in informal employment, with its lack of benefits and security
Top-level jobs still go to men to an overwhelming degree Women are slowly rising to political power, but mainly when boosted by quotas and other special measures
Professional Obstacles
Women fought for decades to take their place in the workplace alongside men, but that fight isn't over yet. According to the most recent statistics from the U.S. Census, women earn just 77 percent of what men earn for the same amount of work. In addition to this gender wage gap, women often face a glass ceiling when it comes to promotions. Women who have children often find themselves penalized for taking time off; if they're not dismissed, they may face discrimination and outdated ideas of what a woman can accomplish if she's pregnant or a mother. Jobs that are considered traditional women's work, such as nursing and teaching, are often some of the lowest-paying fields.
Gender Violence
In 2008, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon reported that one in every three women is likely "to be beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime". In both the
developed and the developing world, violence against women in the form of rape, spousal abuse, child abuse or spousal killing is such routine behavior that it rarely even makes the news anymore. In conflict zones, rape of women and children is increasingly used as a
weapon of war. In other countries, marital rape is condoned, and some countries have laws that require a certain number of male witnesses to testify before a court before it will acknowledge that a rape has occurred. Even in developed countries, women are often
blamed and questioned about actions if they become the victims of rape or physical abuse, while their attackers may not face such questioning. There is also a significant stigma that
boy or a girl, and they may elect to end a pregnancy that would yield a female child. the parents don't receive advance notice, they may kill the child after its birth.
And if
As a result,
the gender ratio in some countries is skewed; in India, for example, there were 927 girls per 1,000 boys in 2001.
were to die, the woman has no legal claim to land that she may have lived on or worked all her life. Often, widows are left homeless because the deceased man's family will throw them out of their homes. And some women remain in abusive marriages so that they won't lose a place to live. Such restricted rights can be particularly frustrating in rural areas where agriculture is dominant. Women may spend their entire lives cultivating and
harvesting foodstuffs for no pay, only to lack a safety net when the father or husband leaves or dies.
Feminization of Poverty
Of course, poverty is not to be the main focus of the resolution pertaining to this topic, but it is interesting to note that there is an increasing trend within societies with exceeding amount of poverty in where females are more likely to sink into lower and lower income brackets. In some cases, women in some countries have no right to own the land on which they live or work. Not only can such a state trap women in abusive marriages, it also contributes to a phenomenon that economists have deemed the "feminization of poverty." More than 1.5
billion people in the world live on less than one dollar a day, and the majority of those people are women. The United Nations often cites the statistic that women do two-thirds of the world's work, receive 10 percent of the world's income and own 1 percent of the means of production. Women can be left destitute if they're denied access to land, but inability to claim land also perpetuates the cycle of poverty. Many female entrepreneurs
have been foiled and left to dwell in poverty because of restricted access to basic legal rights.
Access to Healthcare
In many countries, a pregnant woman in labor can head to any hospital, confident that she will receive assistance in delivery. However, according to the World Health Organization, one woman dies in childbirth every minute of every day. That's more than 500,000 deaths every year, many of which could have been prevented if the woman had been allowed to leave her home to receive treatment, or if she'd had a skilled attendant by her side. Childbirth is but Another
one example of how women receive unequal access to health care services. example is the growing number of women infected with HIV/AIDS.
comprised the bulk of new infections, but in Sub-Saharan Africa, women now form half of the infected persons.
Political Participation
Analysts often posit that many of the issues of gender inequality could be solved if women had higher levels of political participation. Despite making up half the global population, women hold only 15.6 percent of elected parliamentary seats in the world. They're missing
from all levels of government -- local, regional and national. Why is it important that women take part in politics? A study that examined women in leadership in Bolivia,
Cameroon and Malaysia found that when women could take part in shaping spending priorities, they were more likely to invest in family and community resources, health,
education and the eradication of poverty than the men, who were more likely to invest in the military.
Education Attainment
Of the children that aren't in school right now, the majority of them are girls. Women make up more than two-thirds of the world's illiterate adults. Girls may be kept out of school to help with household chores, they may be pulled from school if their father deems it's time for them to marry, or there may only be enough money to educate one child from the family -- and the boy assumes the responsibility. This gap in educational attainment is especially pertinent as numerous studies show that educating girls is a key factor in eliminating poverty and aiding development. Girls who complete school are less likely to marry young, more likely to have smaller families and exhibit better health outcomes in relation to maternal mortality and HIV/AIDS. These women also go on to earn higher
salaries, which they then invest in their own families, thus ensuring that future generations of girls get to go on to school. Indeed, it is addressing the inequalities in education that
Rwanda
Recently, Rwanda conducted elections for the Presidency and the parliament had a referendum on a new constitution. For the first time in Rwanda's history, free and fair elections were held. The new constitution guarantees a minimum of 30 percent of
parliamentary seats and other leadership positions to women. Today, Rwanda has the
highest number of women parliamentarians in the world with women constituting nearly 50 percent in the Chamber of Deputies and about 35 percent in the Senate. The Government of Rwanda also has 34 percent of women in its Cabinet. UNDP has been supporting the Rwanda Parliament, in particular the Rwanda Women Parliamentary Forum. In February 2007, the Forum held an international conference to share its experiences and to forge partnerships with development allies in the area of nation building. Speakers at the
conference agreed that women play a critical role in the development of nations and in the attainment of the MDGs.
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia provides the most extreme example of limited mobility for women: country, women are not allowed to drive a car or ride a bicycle on public roads. In that The strict
Islamic law in the country prohibits women from leaving the home without a man's permission, and if they do leave the home, they can't drive a car. Doing so would require
removal of their veils, which is forbidden, and it could potentially bring them in contact with strange men, another forbidden practice. While Saudi Arabia is the only country that prohibits women from driving a car, other countries restrict women's overseas travels by limiting their access to passports, and even women in developed countries may complain of limited mobility. While these women may have the legal right to drive cars and ride planes, they may elect not to go out by themselves at night due to the threat of rape or attack.
Possible approaches
The United Nations recognizes that the issue of gender inequality is a thorn that has long been in the body of the world. It is a sensitive topic, yet one that pervades deeply into everyday life and work, reaching to the more than three billion women that inhabit the Earth. Delegates must understand the issues and cultures that influence and shape a countrys policies regarding gender inequality. Thus resolutions should address the broad spectrum of inequality. Resolutions being made should address first of all the broad definition of gender inequality and the reams and constructs that put those structures in place. The issues of past UN resolutions, declarations and reports, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Gender Inequality Index and the Human Development Reports can all be taken into consideration.
Furthermore, resolutions could target issues such as disparity of pay between male and females, gender violence, female infanticide and feticide, restricted socio-economic options such as land ownership and political participation and access to healthcare and education.
Pay Equity
http://www.pay-equity.org/
Gender Violence
http://uk.oneworld.net/guides/gender
Feminization of poverty
https://members.weforum.org/pdf/Global_Competitiveness_Reports/Reports/gender_gap. pdf http://www.globalissues.org/article/166/womens-rights
Access to Healthcare
http://www.who.int/features/qa/12/en/index.html http://www.bridge.ids.ac.uk/reports/re56.pdf
Political Participation
https://members.weforum.org/pdf/Global_Competitiveness_Reports/Reports/gender_gap. pdf
Education Attainment
https://members.weforum.org/pdf/Global_Competitiveness_Reports/Reports/gender_gap. pdf