WOMEN BEAR THE BRUNT OF INEQUALITY Last January, the World Economic Forum made the call for 2018 to be “the year for women to thrive”. It urged governments to raise women’s participation in the labour force to that of men.
But two months earlier, in November 2017, the organization had said that it will take 217 years to close the economic gender gap. Prior to this, in 2015, following concerted campaigning by women’s groups and development and human rights organizations, governments had made a political commitment, under the UN Sustainable Development Goals, to achieve gender equality by 2030. There is a stark mismatch between the commitment to achieve gender equality within 12 years - including through women’s equal rights to economic resources - and the prognosis that it will in fact take more than two centuries.
BARRIERS TO WOMEN’S ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL RIGHTS The barriers to women achieving their economic and social rights are well documented. The UN says that women own only 12.8% of the world’s agricultural land. Lack of security of tenure is a major obstacle to women’s rights to food, work and housing in rural and urban areas. Discriminatory inheritance, and personal and property laws frequently impede women’s ability to rent, own or register land or property. Amnesty International’s 2018 report on Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) demonstrated how the traditional system of land allocation, kukhonta, by chiefs who traditionally allocate land to men, often disadvantages women. One woman, forcibly evicted from her home after the authorities demolished it, told us “It’s very difficult as a woman to kukhonta. You need a male. Otherwise you won’t be able to get land, or be heard.”
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For more than a decade, Amnesty International has called on governments to guarantee a minimum degree of security of tenure to everyone. This must include protection against forced evictions, harassment and other threats. Governments continue, however, to carry out land acquisitions for large commercial projects or redevelopment of urban areas in ways which flagrantly breach international law and result in forced evictions. The impacts are deeply gendered because of women’s differential access to land and property rights, and drive women into, or further into, poverty. For example, Indigenous Sengwer women described to Amnesty International how forced evictions from Kenya’s Embobut forest destroyed their financial autonomy because they lost access to the forest, land and livestock upon which they depend for their livelihoods and cultural identity. A Sengwer woman, who received no compensation, said, “I am hosted [living in someone else’s home], I have no land, no bedding, I hardly have food. I do casual labour in people’s farms. I live in destitution.”
GROSSLY INADEQUATE PROTECTION OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS TO AND AT WORK According to the World Bank, Brazil, Egypt, France, India, Russia and 99 other countries still have laws which prevent women from working in specific jobs. More than 2.7 billion women are therefore legally restricted from having the same choice of jobs as men. The Fielding School of Public Health, a think tank, found that only 87
