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Paragraph 160 – Beijing Platform for Action

2022-04-27

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/09/30

160. Lack of employment in the private sector and reductions in public services and public service jobs have affected women disproportionately. In some countries, women take on more unpaid work, such as the care of children and those who are ill or elderly, compensating for lost household income, particularly when public services are not available. In many cases, employment creation strategies have not paid sufficient attention to occupations and sectors where women predominate; nor have they adequately promoted the access of women to those occupations and sectors that are traditionally male.

Beijing Declaration (1995)

Paragraph 160 of the Beijing Declaration provides an emphasis on minimal employment opportunities available circa 1995 in the private sector for women in addition to the “reductions in public services and public service jobs.”

Within these contexts, we come to the issues in which the lower opportunities for women yield lower outcomes in employment, whether “in the private sector… [or] in… public service jobs.” In other words, women aren’t being given a fair shake, circa 1995. If we look further at the educational statistics in the current moment, women dominate the market of higher education; the guys are as much there.

In this, the generic statement is the guys are flaming. Dr. Leonard Sax has spoken on some of this; Professor Philip Zimbardo alongside Nikita Coulombe/Nikita Duncan spoke on some of this. Neither Sax nor Coulombe/Zimbardo spoke comprehensively on these issues – how ever appropriately in identification of some of the inter-related issues.

These lacks create a basis for even the more educated classes of women garnering equal opportunities in work and, therefore, in economic outcomes. Those economic outcomes intimately twinned with the impacts on the ways in women can gain economic independence in their lives.

Those ‘lacks’ maintain a problem for women being able to take on more expansive visions for their lives and their families; and, this impacts “women disproportionately.” Within some of the unspecified Member States, women “take on more unpaid work.”

This echoes many of the prior paragraphs about lack of equality in work and pay. Pay for work in general because women are doing more of the caring of infants and children, caretaking of the elderly, and their familial and community pieces of service work.

This unpaid work does have consequences in a number of ways, by logical implication. If an individual woman is required by sociocultural or religious traditions to partake of more unpaid work in the home and with the children, in the community, and for the elderly, then this can take a psychological toll on the ways in which the woman’s life outcomes unfold; furthermore, if a woman is required by the same to take on unpaid work, then this takes away potential time for paid work.

All this is an aside to real substantive change to the infrastructure of the society, the definitions of a successful life, or the idea of how meaning is instantiated into an individual life from reality, or simple base pay for work counted, at present, as unpaid work. Women, nonetheless, are left, in general, to simply dal with “lost household income” as a result of having to take on more unpaid work.

I left out care of the ill, too.

Without the appropriate “public services,” these are necessities to be carried out over time, which, in turn, diminishes available energy, time and general resources for paid employment for women. Apparently, of the extant employment creation strategies available in 1995, there was insufficient provision for the women-dominated sectors or occupations.

This lack of recognition or acknowledgement, as has been described elsewhere in the Beijing Declaration, leads to reduced functionality in regards to covering the needs of women in these different domains.

In addition, not only the recognition and acknowledgement, there is an inadequate promotion – again, circa 1995 and probably now, but less so an issue – of the “occupations and sectors” for women where there are “traditionally male[s]” more often than not.

All these compound and coalesce into the bundle of discriminatory representation of women in work, where that which happens outside of the restaurant, the lumber mill, the nurses office, the school, the C  suite, and the like, impacts what happens in them in regards to paid work.

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(Updated 2020-09-27, only use the updated listing, please) Not all nations, organizations, societies, or individuals accept the proposals of the United Nations; one can find similar statements in other documents, conventions, declarations and so on, with the subsequent statements of equality or women’s rights, and the important days and campaigns devoted to the rights of women and girls too:

Documents

Strategic Aims

Celebratory Days

Guidelines and Campaigns

Women and Men Women’s Rights Campaigners

License

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.

Copyright

© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.

From → Chronology, Jacobsen's Bank, The Good Men Project

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