Paragraph 19 of the Beijing Platform for Action, Chapter II: Global Framework
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/09
19. Economic recession in many developed and developing countries, as well as ongoing restructuring in countries with economies in transition, have had a disproportionately negative impact on women’s employment. Women often have no choice but to take employment that lacks long-term job security or involves dangerous working conditions, to work in unprotected home-based production or to be unemployed. Many women enter the labour market in under-remunerated and undervalued jobs, seeking to improve their household income; others decide to migrate for the same purpose. Without any reduction in their other responsibilities, this has increased the total burden of work for women.
Beijing Declaration (1995)
Now, as per some of the recent articles about the Beijing Declaration, the general idea is the economic recession consequences – probably any – affecting the livelihoods of women and developing countries more than others. The various restructuring programs or initiatives for the long-term benefit through the transition of the developing countries impacts women more than men.
In other words, women are considered either last or not at all in these calculations as the countries or nations move to more and more developed statuses or when economic recessions hit the global or the national economies. Our next questions become, if biased in the favour of the improvement of the least among us – globally – in the population or unprovided for women, the ways in which to include women within the economic recession protections, the jobs programs, and in the central discourse around structural adjustment programs for the benefits of the most women.
It is not an easy problem to solve because a) it is global and b) has forces working against it. The economic access of women with a society is indicative of the level of advancement and empowerment of women. Indeed, the ways in which access to financial assets provides choices in the societies means there are more ways a particular citizen or group to garner forms of power and influence within the society.
The idea of freedom, autonomy, and then the women being left with “no choice but to take employment that lacks long-term job security” provides an insight into the nature of what has been stated by Professor Noam Chomsky, formerly at MIT and now at Arizona State University, as the global precariat or those living in precarious circumstances; this extends across the globe, and as noted in the documentation and paragraphs’ respective articles before, relates to excess militarism and associated military expenditure, and the structural adjustment programs without women even in mind.
Women bear this brunt. They get in the negative wave and cycle of these plans and initiatives, where they are not considered and then live without prospects for decent, long-term employment. It leaves them with little job security and then has them have no choice but to take these poor working conditions employment ‘opportunities’ and live more penurious lives than they would, otherwise. This defines one more of unfairness and injustice – to promise freedom and deny the levers and access to the opportunities for full flourishing through it.
Then the women who do these precarious employments have worse pay and fewer or no benefits, with the jobs that tend to garner less prestige and so this does not improve, at least substantially, the economic prospective of the entire household. These create problems in the cycles of the poverty of women, and their children and so familial cyclical poverty. Again, we come more to intergenerational injustice and unfairness in this sense.
The total burden on women increases in this world order and the supports are not there to help them in the cases of needing them, where, if a global majority of the world’s poor, amounts to the international set of women who are more prone to need the supports than the men. It burdens women unduly; whereas, the structures, such as the structural adjustment programs, are set in motion with the richer and the men in mind by implication.
But why? Or how? Women are more often impacted negatively in a variety of ways, who are most often the poor; that is to say inversely, men more positively and the rich more positively compared to women and the poor, whether in net income or in the employment opportunities – and so life prospectives. These are international crimes on large swathes of the population as an implication of conscious economic policy.
–One can find similar statements in other documents, conventions, declarations and so on, with the subsequent statements of equality or women’s rights:
- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the Preamble, Article 16, and Article 25(2).
- Convention Against Discrimination in Education (1960) in Article 1.
- The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) in Article 3, Article 7, and Article 13.
- International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966).
- Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979).
- Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984).
- The Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (1993).
- Beijing Declaration(1995).
- United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000).
- Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children (2000).
- The Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa or the “Maputo Protocol” (2003).
- Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence or the Istanbul Convention (2011) Article 38 and Article 39.
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