Blog by Elena Kerr, SI Edinburgh (SIGBI)
SI CSW70 Delegate
Today I attended this event organised by the BBVA Microfinance Foundation and the Permanent Mission of the Dominican Republic to the United Nations. This event discussed how legal, social, and cultural norms are major obstacles to achieving gender equality in political, economic, social, and family participation. Gender bias limits participation and social norms limit economic independence, specifically exemplified in Latin America. One of the major issues raised at this event was how women lack resources for shocks, and how to bounce back from a shock, exemplified with Covid-19.
The panel presented how 80% of displaced people are women, and that over 40% of women are either unemployed or work in the informal sector. In this sense, poverty is reinforced by gender biases as women are expected to provide care responsibilities within families, which is unpaid work. Care work is disproportionately expected to be in the responsibilities of women, and when women dedicate more time to care work, they are at higher risk of poverty. It is therefore important to invest in strategic comprehensive policies that focus on gender. Women who have care responsibilities must be able to take time off from work. The panel also discussed how 1/10 people have gender biases. This must be deconstructed as gender equality benefits all humans, and men must therefore be allies.
This event highlighted how women are needed across all sectors as well as men, not only in the fields following and reinforcing traditional societal norms. Inequalities are rooted in beliefs that exist in society, societal norms exclude women and limit women’s participation in the labour market. It is therefore important to take action across all sectors. This event underlined the importance that we need the private sector, local governance, and civil society to collaborate to break these biases to build equality. Overall, this event thereby calls for collective effort in deconstructing the gendered biases rooted in society, as well as the importance of financing policies for equality.
