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Advocacy for Gender Equality
Module II
Background material
The Beijing Platform for Action
In 1995 an international conference in Beijing brought women and men from around
the world together to address inequalities in women’s access to economic resources
such as land and natural resources, credit, technology and training, and to introduce
measures to end the discrimination women face in labour markets.
Three important issues in the Beijing Platform for Action on which governments commit
themselves to take action are: equal access to land and property, employment rights
and the recognition of women’s unpaid work.
Commitments to Women’s Equal Access to Land and Other Property
To introduce legislative and administrative reforms to give women equal rights with
men to economic resources, including access to ownership and control over land and
other forms of property;
to “remove all obstacles… to their ability to buy, hold and sell property and land
equally with men”.
Commitments to Women’s Employment Rights
To enact and enforce laws and measures to eliminate discrimination against women
employees on the grounds of sex, age, marital and family status, in relation to access
to and conditions of employment, training, promotion, maternity leave and social
security, as well as legal protection against employers requiring proof of
contraceptive use; sexual and racial harassment; or dismissal due to pregnancy;
to extend labour standards and social protection and to create social security
systems for part-time, temporary, seasonal and home-based workers, without
destroying the ability of the informal economy to generate employment;
to change policies that reinforce the gender division of labour to promote equal
sharing of family responsibility for unpaid domestic work.
Commitments to Measuring and Valuing Unpaid Work
To devise statistical means to “recognise and make visible” women’s unpaid work;
to develop methods to reflect the value of such work in quantitative terms for
“possible reflection” in core national accounts;
to examine the “relationship of women’s unremunerated work to the incidence of and
their vulnerability to poverty”.
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