Women’s Economic Empowerment: current realities and priorities for the future Presentation to Women 2000-III: Gender Equity in Economics July 7th 2005, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Situation analysis  International global consensus on the importance of women’s economic empowerment;  Lack of attention and resources devoted to the issue of women’s economic empowerment;  Lack of coherence between macro-economic policies and development policies and programmes;  True economic empowerment for women remains elusive;

 Globally, women still hold only 15.6% of parliamentary seats;  Women earn less than 78% of the wages that men earn for the same work;  Women constitute two thirds of the world’s illiterate;  Poor women represent two thirds of the world’s poor people;  Women provide up to 70% of agricultural labour and produce over 90% of the world’s food;  Women occupy between 20 and 40 % of managerial positions;  The labour force of the informal economy is overwhelmingly female; Situation analysis

INSTRAW’s work on women’s economic empowerment….  Integration of gender and women’s issues in global economic policy and decision-making;  Review and analysis of economic programmes and projects to identify and disseminate good practices;  Call to establish a true measure of women’s economic empowerment

Integrate gender into economic policy and decision-making  Incompatibility between: –Women’s economic contributions in both market and non- market sectors; –International development goals and priorities; and –Current macro-economic policy and decision-making.  Economic policies are seldom, if ever, gender neutral;  Formulated and implemented without an assessment of their potential gender impacts

Integrate gender into economic policy and decision-making  Address the real impact of macro-economic policies through concrete actions : –Increase financial services available to women; –Develop legal frameworks that eliminate gender biases in financial institutions; –Increase inclusion of poor women in economic bodies and financial structures; –Incorporate gender perspectives into budget processes; –Undertake gender analyses of economic policies –Develop policy frameworks that allow women to move away from the ghetto of micro-finance

Identify good practices  Need to systematically evaluate micro-finance and other initiatives;  Impacts on women’s economic status, and their status within the household and community;  Establish successful experiences and best practices on which to base future initiatives;  Identify gaps to guide future policy advocacy and gender mainstreaming efforts.

Establish a measure of women’s economic empowerment  3 different elements - resources, agency and achievements;  Concretizes an otherwise ambiguous concept; –How do we define empowerment? –Who defines empowerment? –How do we know when women are empowered? –Who gets to decide when women are empowered?  Baseline to measure improvements and changes in women’s economic status;  Measurement of all the many ways in which women contribute to economic growth and development;  INSTRAW’s research on the gender dimensions of remittances