Paragraph 27 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): 2018/09/12
27. Since 1975, knowledge of the status of women and men, respectively, has increased and is contributing to further actions aimed at promoting equality between women and men. In several countries, there have been important changes in the relationships between women and men, especially where there have been major advances in education for women and significant increases in their participation in the paid labour force. The boundaries of the gender division of labour between productive and reproductive roles are gradually being crossed as women have started to enter formerly male-dominated areas of work and men have started to accept greater responsibility for domestic tasks, including child care. However, changes in women’s roles have been greater and much more rapid than changes in men’s roles. In many countries, the differences between women’s and men’s achievements and activities are still not recognized as the consequences of socially constructed gender roles rather than immutable biological differences.
Beijing Declaration (1995)
Women and men have continued to live in societies of greater and greater quality matched, in part, with more and more equality. The basic emphasis on the status of women, and men relative to women’s lesser status historically, and the ways in which conscious social and economic policy, though most often exclusion, put women at a massive disadvantage is societal life.
Now, as with history deniers such as in Holocaust denial, climatology deniers such as climate change or global warming deniers, biology deniers such as evolution by natural selection rejectors through preference for religious Young Earth Creationism, medicine deniers such as anti-vaccination ideology or assertions – without scientific or medical basis – of a link between vaccines and autism, these emerge once more. The denial of the evidence.
The human rights as ethical, GDP improvement as economic, and social development indices as sociocultural, evidence for the better societal choices in the advancement and empowerment of women, which amount to the denial of the massive preponderance of evidence – not selective and generally international and cross-cultural over decades evidence in support of gender equality.
The conscious work, since at least 1975, has been showing dramatic changes, by which I mean improvements, in the livelihoods of the world’s citizenry while also advancing gender equality. The big improvements have been coming from the increased education of women and then the inclusion of more women into the paid labor markets.
The lines are becoming more fluid and able to accommodate gender role fluidity in many ways, where the women are working more, becoming more educated, and the men are taking on more, but by no means the majority, of the household or homecare and childcare chores.
The rapid shift into a situation where women feel more comfortable and less shamed – and have the educational and professional pathways to head into the job market of higher powered positions – about these high-level careers creates an opportunity for men to expand their potentials in the home, which makes for a more flexible population in some sectors.
The basic premise in paragraph 27 is not entirely biological or social constructionism but, rather, the leaning, in terms of gender roles, more towards the social construction of the roles – because these remain bound in social or interpersonal life – compared to the traditionalist perspective of childcare and homecare as solely the domain of women.
It is a non-trivial switch in the perspective because of the varied ways in which the history of the world has been significantly based on the suppression of simply women owning land, voting, getting educated, or holding a job – all important aspects of being an independent person in a free and open society.
The traditionalist argument for pure biological essentialism tends to argue for these forms of limitation and can come from a number of sources, often from purported religious holy texts for starters – or in the inconvenience to some sexist attitudes about women being inherently inferior to men in cognitive capacity, as seen in someone as brilliant as Aristotle.
He invents logic but has highly regressive attitudes about women and their capacities given the context of the time, which can, in part carry over into the modern day. The work to push back against them and implement the rights of women as persons creates the conditions for the moral advances, ecoonomic growth, and social development indicated by the evidence.
It becomes, as with the evidence for the scientific theories presented above in a variety of fields, not a question about the facts or the theories but more about the preferred, even optimal, means by which to implement these beneficial programs for women’s advancement and empowerment to garner the varieties of benefits.
–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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