Asia-Pacific Commemoration of International Women’s Day
Date:
Speech delivered by Dr. Miwa Kato, Regional Director for Asia and the Pacific at UNCC, Bangkok, Thailand
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Excellences, members of the diplomatic Corps, Civil Society and Private Sector representatives, Distinguished Guests, ladies and gentlemen,
Greetings.
On behalf of the UN Women Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, I would like to begin by thanking Dr. Shamshad Akhtar, Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Secretary of ESCAP, for the inspirational opening address to commemorate International Women’s Day.
The theme of this year is “Women in the Changing World of Work: Planet 50:50 by 2030”, aligned to the theme of the 61st session of the Commission on the Status of Women which opens on 13 March at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. CSW will focus attention on breaking barriers that limit women’s decent work and their full employment.
The world of work in Asia-Pacific is changing in significant ways, marked by innovations – especially in digital and information and communications technologies – and the increasing informality and mobility of labour. While the world of work is changing, structural barriers to gender equality and gender-based discrimination persist within and across countries, and require priority attention to strengthen the foundations for women’s economic empowerment.
As witnessed in a number of countries, participation of women in the labor force has either fallen or remained stagnant. On an average, female labour force participation declined both in East Asia from 71 per cent in 1994 to 63 per cent in 2014, and in South Asia from 36 to 31 per cent over the same period. In Southeast Asia and the Pacific, it remained stagnant at low rate of 59 per cent. Gender gap in labour participation persists despite economic growth, decreasing fertility rates, and increased in gender-equal education. Underutilization of the half of the labour force results in economic losses and reduce the potential growth rates of an economy. It seriously affects productivity, essential to economic growth and sustainability we all need.
Women are systematically paid less than men for work of equal value across countries and sectors in this region. The gender pay gap is 20 per cent in East Asia and the Pacific and 33 per cent in South Asia.
Across the region, too many women and girls spend too many hours a day on household responsibilities, typically more than double the time spent by men and boys. In many cases, this unequal division of labour is at the expense of women’s and girls’ learning, paid work, engagement in civic or community leadership, leisure, sports, rest and even sleep. This is the unchanging world of unrewarded work and withered futures, where girls and their mothers sustain the family with free labour, with lives whose trajectories are very different from the men of the household. This makes the norm of where women and men are positioned in the economy, of what they are skilled to do and where they will work, obviously disadvantaging women.
At the same time, women make up a large portion of vulnerable employment in the region with precarious and unsafe working conditions, such as migrant workers, domestic workers, informal workers and workers in agriculture and certain manufacturing industries. Women remain concentrated in lower earning segments with lower tenure, lower pay, fewer entitlements, greater insecurity and exposure to violence and harassment. In East Asia and the Pacific (excluding China), 78 per cent of women are in informal employment – with over a third are in informal agricultural self-employment.
Women migrant workers, who are nearly half of global and Asia Pacific labour migration, are among the most vulnerable groups of workers. Women’s migrant work is largely low skilled and low paid with a significant amount being in the domestic work and care sector. The gender-based barriers and restrictions on women’s migration puts women at risk of irregular migration. If women are to realize their potential gains from increased trade and economic integration, these barriers also need to be removed.
These gender gaps in the world of work are rooted in historically unequal power relations between women and men in the household and in the economy more broadly. They are also a result of gender-biased design and impacts of macroeconomic fiscal, monetary, and trade policies; discriminatory laws and social norms; and greater constraints on women in balancing work and family responsibilities. Violence against women in the world of work increases gender inequalities, holds back women workers’ voice and agency and signifies high costs to women in lost earnings and wellbeing.
However, we want to construct a different world of work for women. As they grow up, girls must be exposed to a broad range of careers, and encouraged to make choices that lead beyond the traditional service, care and low-scale agriculture options to decent and sustainable jobs in industry, art, public service, commercial agriculture, private sector, entrepreneurship, law enforcement, technology and science.
Realizing women’s economic empowerment requires transformative, structural change. However, the Asia-Pacific region is faced with increasing pressure and challenges, including the concentration of wealth in fewer hands, a regression of women’s rights in some countries, competing priorities and emerging crises, such as climate change and its related disasters.
Urgent policy action and innovative measures are required to overcome these barriers and ensure women’s economic empowerment in the changing world of work. Women’s economic empowerment requires political will and partnerships to develop and implement policies that integrate gender equality perspectives in labour institutions and programmes at local, national and global levels. It requires enhanced interventions to tackle persistent gender inequalities and gaps in the world of work, and stepped-up attention to technological and digital changes to ensure they become vehicles for women’s economic empowerment. Growing and emerging areas, such as green economies and climate change mitigation and adaptation, also offer new opportunities for decent work for women.
The Commission on the Status of Women, at its sixty-first session, has the opportunity to significantly advance women’s economic empowerment in the changing world of work. From this region, government and civil society will be taking forward to the Commission on the Status of Women key recommendations to advance women’s economic empowerment collectively identified during the recent Asia-Pacific policy dialogue on “Women’s Economic Empowerment in the Changing World of Work” jointly organized by UN Women and ESCAP with the technical support and collaboration of the Thematic Working Group on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment with the high-level participation from government, civil society, private sector and academia in the region.
This comes at a moment when the international community has made an unprecedented commitment to gender equality and women's empowerment in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Only with women’s economic empowerment can the global economy yield inclusive and equitable growth that generates decent work for all, reduces poverty, and improves wellbeing and livelihoods so that prosperity is shared and no one is left behind.
UN Women will be mobilizing around the issue of women’s economic empowerment with key steps to make transformative change for working women in Asia and the Pacific. To advance this agenda UN Women is supporting its member States in a variety of ways. For example by recognizing ICTs’ tremendous potential to increase women’s economic and political empowerment as the 2030 agenda clearly recognizes.
With funding from the Australian Government and in partnership with ILO, UN Women has published a publication “Worker, helper, auntie, maid?” that investigates the uncharted territory of domestic work in Thailand and Malaysia. The joint study was undertaken as part of the UN Women project on ‘Preventing the Exploitation of Women Migrant Workers in ASEAN’, which builds on UN Women’s existing work within ASEAN on safe migration and ending all forms of violence against women. It was funded by the Australian Government.
I am hopeful that today in this event, we can bring together different stakeholders to highlight key priorities, challenges, gaps and opportunities to promoting women’s economic empowerment in the changing world of work in Asia and the Pacific to raise awareness, foster partnerships and harness visibility on critical messages related to Women in the Changing World of Work, Planet 50-50 by 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals.
Thank you very much.