in the vast majority of countries. However, ‘equal opportunities’ do not become real just because formal barriers are removed.38 Women continue to be excluded from political office by discriminatory attitudes and ‘old boys’ networks’ in political parties, by lack of funds to run election campaigns and by family responsibilities that clash with the inflexible working hours of political institutions. In recognition of these structural constraints, quotas to increase women’s representation have been
adopted across a number of developing and developed countries alike.39 The understanding that special measures are necessary to overcome the disadvantages that women face can be usefully extended to other domains. Indeed, the need for such measures, to achieve equality in practice has long been recognized in the international human rights system.
SUBSTANTIVE EQUALITY IN HUMAN RIGHTS FRAMEWORKS The international human rights system in general, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in particular, recognizes the limitations of formal equality in delivering equality in practice. Within the human rights system and its associated treaties, there is strong support for going beyond formal equality and the provision of ‘same treatment’. The concept of substantive equality has been advanced in key human rights treaties to capture this broader understanding: that inequality can be structural and discrimination indirect; that equality has to be understood in relation to outcomes as well as opportunities; and that ‘different treatment’ might be required to achieve equality in practice (see Box 1.2). While formal equality refers to the adoption of laws and policies that treat women and men equally,
substantive equality is concerned with the results and outcomes of these: ‘ensuring that they do not maintain, but rather alleviate, the inherent disadvantage that particular groups experience’.40 The concept of substantive equality arose out of the recognition that—because of the legacy of historical inequalities, structural disadvantages, biological differences and biases in how laws and policies are implemented in practice—formal equality is not enough to ensure that women are able to enjoy the same rights as men. To achieve substantive equality, therefore, requires both direct and indirect discrimination to be addressed. It also requires specific measures to be adopted that redress women’s disadvantages and, in the longer term, the transformation of the institutions and structures that reinforce and reproduce unequal power relations between women and men.
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