Women, girls at bitter end of conflicts
Madam,
The every day reality for women is that of entrenched and perpetual exclusion, particularly in senior leadership roles. On this account, the country, much like the rest of the world, is no different.
The reality is that in many spheres of life gender parity remains elusive. Women and girls, by extension, have also been rendered children of a lesser God by global developments over the past four years. First was the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, whose aftereffects and a subsequent cost-of-living crisis deepened levels of poverty. This, in turn, has led to women continuing to be disproportionately affected by food insecurity, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.
Women and girls are also at the bitter end of interstate and intrastate conflict. The ongoing Israel-Hamas war in the Middle East has led to wholesale death and maiming of women and children in far greater numbers than men.
Civil conflict in Sudan – between two megalomaniac men – and flare-ups of violence in the volatile eastern parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo also contribute to misery and widespread displacement, with women and girls being the most vulnerable. In Haiti, intensifying gang violence has led to a spike in child marriages. Unabated violence and lawlessness in that country have also forced girls to leave school and made them vulnerable to recruitment into these gun-toting outfits.
In all these instances, and others around the world, violence has exacerbated the risks of gender-based violence, sexual exploitation and abuse, displacement, the loss of livelihoods and deepening poverty levels.
While women and men could earn equal pay, women still perform on average 2.4 hours more unpaid care work than men, with much of it involving caring for children. This not only adds to women’s workload but also bars them from expanding economic activities such as overtime work and entrepreneurial pursuits.
According to the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law 2024 report, expanding childcare tends to increase women’s economic participation by one per cent. The same can be said about inclusion into leadership positions. The overall share of women in senior leadership positions globally was 32.2 per cent in 2023, with men outnumbering women across all industries, particularly in manufacturing, agriculture, supply chain and transportation, among others.
The intersectional nature of these inequities means efforts geared towards eradicating them must be multidimensional. Among these is the full utilisation of institutional architecture whose main priority is to deter society from perpetuating the historical marginalisation of women. This points to the enforcement of laws and the appreciation of gender mainstreaming as a constitutional imperative.
Concerted efforts are also needed to
combat both income and time poverty. Women’s inclusion in the workforce, for example, must not constitute impoverished inclusion where earnings still keep them lingering below the poverty line. Interventions should also account for the care deficit by recognising, reducing and reorganising unpaid care work.
With the re-emergence of fiscal consolidation and austerity measures it is important to ensure that spending cuts do not negatively impact the provision of programmes that benefit women. Here we ought to be also wary of women’s unpaid care work doubling up as a subsidy for the government’s reduced social spending in areas such as health, education and sanitation.
Of equal importance is the need for more coalitions, collaborations and partnerships to bring women’s civil society organisations into direct dialogue with key role players in the government and private sectors. This will strengthen women’s grassroots organisations’ influence on policymaking and the setting of norms.
Therefore, we ought to honour our commitments to instruments such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). It is up to actors at all levels – within civil society, business, government and organisations in the cultural and religious sphere – to rescue society from the insidious discrimination that undermines the freedom and dignity of women and girls. Any form of discrimination is an affront to our collective humanity.
Nontobeko G