Beijing Platform for Action. Chapter IV. B. Education and Training of Women – Paragraphs 73 & 74
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/07
73. Women should be enabled to benefit from an ongoing acquisition of knowledge and skills beyond those acquired during youth. This concept of lifelong learning includes knowledge and skills gained in formal education and training, as well as learning that occurs in informal ways, including volunteer activity, unremunerated work and traditional knowledge.
74. Curricula and teaching materials remain gender-biased to a large degree, and are rarely sensitive to the specific needs of girls and women. This reinforces traditional female and male roles that deny women opportunities for full and equal partnership in society. Lack of gender awareness by educators at all levels strengthens existing inequities between males and females by reinforcing discriminatory tendencies and undermining girls’ self-esteem. The lack of sexual and reproductive health education has a profound impact on women and men.
Beijing Declaration (1995)
The Beijing Declaration is important for women’s rights on several levels of analysis. In particular, the area of training, acquisition of skills, and the garnering of knowledge through education. In the area of knowledge and skill acquisition, many women may not have the opportunity, even more true circa 1995, to partake of schooling.
They could be denied schools. They could have schools but be denied equal access to boys and men regarding schooling. Or they could be denied schooling even with schools outright, or given schooling but with inadequate and lower than quality textbooks, supplies, and teachers.
Apart from the schooling environment and access, the contents of the texts could, in fact, be discriminatory in the representation of women and girls, and men and boys. The common cultural knowledge now where the stereotypes were limited in view by their nature, the behaviours rote, and the portrayal of the individuals 2-dimensional.
With the inclusion of a wider array of voices and individuals, the gendered perspective, not as the whole picture but, as an adjunction to the formulation of curricula and teaching materials. The acknowledgement of girls’ and women’s concerns is important; indeed, it can be done in a subtle, informative, and entertaining way.
The reinforcement of stereotyped roles handed down from an understandably more restricted prior age creates the basis for acknowledgement of the past, reformulation of the present, for the construction of a better future. In this case, a future bound to more flexible notions of what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman, in between, or otherwise.
The lack of knowledge about not only what gender means but also how this connects to real people living in the world is important.
This, over time, can work at the proverbial pipeline portion of the issues of gender inequality in attitudes and assumptions, and even prejudices – as bias against women and girls, typically, emerges when women or girls act in a non-standard or unexpected way, e.g., working in a trade, taking the initiative in a date or sexual encounter, pursuing a scientific career, choosing to not have children, and so on.
The bullying women and girls may – and, in fact, do – experience can undermine confidence or self-esteem, as noted in paragraph 74. The questions then arise about the appropriateness of this as not a social norm, as in accepted, but a common occurrence without sufficient negative attention to it, condemnation.
Education is part of the solution to this. Same with the ability to make independent and informed choices about their own bodies. Both the bullying and the referenced-implied improper sexual education of women and girls has a huge impact on life trajectories, especially as this relates to confidence to pursue a dream career and also – if wanting a family and children – when to have them and how many, and under what socio-economic circumstances.
–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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