New public policies omit knowledge gained from gender studies, UN research group says

As United Nations declarations go, are the Beijing documents or the Millennium Declaration texts more likely to produce sustainable development?

The answer may depend on how progress is measured. A new report from the Geneva-based UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) says despite women's recent advances, socially and politically men and women still live in parallel universes.

According to UNRISD Director Thandika Mkandawire, many policy debates on structural adjustment, economic liberalization, democratization and ethnic conflicts are not systematically integrating the new knowledge being generated in gender studies and women's studies.

"On one side there are policies being made, but on the other the policy makers are not drawing adequately on what is known from research on gender," he said at a press briefing earlier this week during the two-week UN review of progress towards gender equality since the 1995 Beijing women's conference.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) call for the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, the provision of universal primary education, the promotion of gender equality, the improvement of maternal and child health, combating such diseases as HIV/AIDS and malaria, ensuring a sustainable environment and developing a global partnership for development.

The UN Fund for Women (UNIFEM) has said, however, that "many women's human rights advocates have noted that gender equality, as a cross-cutting concern for the achievement of all the MDGs, is not well-reflected in the global targets and indicators."

The UNRISD report, "Gender Equality: Striving for Justice in an Unequal World," says macroeconomic aggregates, such as gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, for instance, do not take into account unpaid labour, which is largely undertaken by women. In any case, it says, money is a limited measure of well-being.

It advocates putting gender equality at the core of efforts to reorient the development agenda. To meet some of the key contemporary challenges – economic growth and structural transformation, equality and social protection and democratization – this ordering of priorities is essential, it says.

Joining Mr. Mkandawire at the briefing was UNRISD researcher Shahra Razavi, who said her team believes that the Beijing Platform for Action offers more in its goals and is a more comprehensive agenda for development that the MDGs.

The trend towards rallying around the MDGs diminishes both expectations and standards by diluting Beijing's goals, she said.

Through new laws, many countries recognize women's rights in divorce, child custody, domestic violence and reproductive rights, but "gains made in women's rights remain as fragile as the democratic institutions and procedures that should give them legitimacy and protection," the 70-member UNRISD team said in a release about the 336-page report.

Conservative forces and coalitions still challenge international human rights norms, related agendas are being weakened by terrorism, militarism and war, while de-centralization has sometimes undermined the political advancement of women, it said.

"What counts as progress is often a contested field in which there are competing visions of 'the good society' and of women's place within it," UNRISD said.

"The concept of progress has itself undergone revision and qualification, along with the realization that the complex process of social change does not follow a uniform path and offers few guaranteed outcomes. Social and economic development may not always enlarge the realm of human freedom, nor is the idea of 'development' always, or simply, associated with one version of modernity," it added.