A/HRC/44/51 discrimination remains a common experience for many women, in which they are either dismissed, moved into lower paid roles or denied advancement opportunities. Furthermore, the lack of access to sexual and reproductive rights and services deny women the opportunity to make autonomous decisions about pregnancy and childbearing, which has an impact on their employment outcomes and their unpaid care work responsibility. Globally, women do three times as much unpaid care and domestic work as men, reflecting discriminatory stereotypes based on sex and gender that feminize this work. Across the world, 606 million working-age women (21.7 per cent) perform unpaid care work on a fulltime basis, compared with 41 million men (1.5 per cent).7 14. Despite increased female education, occupational and sectoral segregation remains deeply entrenched globally, with women remaining clustered in low paid jobs and sectors, with limited prospects for career progression. The global gender pay gap stands at an unwavering 20 per cent and is wider for women who experience multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination. Systemic disadvantage experienced by mothers in the workplace contributes to a larger pay gap and dramatically lower retirement savings or pension contributions, known as the “motherhood penalty”. Globally, only 27.1 per cent of managers are women, a figure that has changed very little over the past 27 years. 8 Such data not only reflects the persistent barriers women face, but also the low societal value ascribed to the work that women do. 15. Gender-based violence and harassment in the workplace persist at shocking levels. In recent years an unprecedented number of women have spoken out about sexual violence and harassment against women and the systems of power and domination that have silenced them for so long. While recent global data is limited, a 2014 European Union-wide study found that every second woman (55 per cent) has experienced sexual harassment at least once since the age of 15. Among those, 32 per cent identified somebody from the employment context – such as a colleague, a boss or a customer – as the perpetrator. 9 Women in vulnerable forms of informal work, such as domestic workers, market vendors and waste-pickers, are particularly vulnerable to harassment and violence in the course of their work.10 16. Discriminatory laws that restrict women’s rights persist in many parts of the world and progress in introducing laws to advance gender equality in work is slow. Ninety countries still have at least one legal restriction on the jobs women can hold. 11 Less than half of the 190 countries studied by the World Bank have legislation mandating equal remuneration for work of equal value. 12 Discriminatory family and personal status laws in some countries continue to have a negative impact on women’s ability to engage in paid work. 17. In order to fully understand the nature and scope of discrimination against women in the world of work, it is important to take an intersectional approach, given that there are multiple forms of discrimination at play that result in very specific vulnerabilities and differences in employment outcomes. For example, for Roma women in many parts of Europe the lack of access to education, coupled with residential segregation and discrimination, exclude them from the formal labour market, forcing them to take up precarious and low paid work, creating a poverty trap.13 According to information received by the Working Group, Dalit women disproportionately experience discrimination at work, even in urban settings and in skilled work. Dalit women earn half the average daily wage 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 ILO, A Quantum Leap for Gender Equality: For A Better Future of Work for All (Geneva, 2019). Ibid. European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, Violence against Women: an EU-wide survey – Main results (Luxembourg, Publications Office of the European Union, 2014). See https://www.wiego.org/sites/default/files/migrated/publications/ files/ILC_WIEGO_Briefing%20Note%20Violence%20in%20the%20workplace%20EN%20for%20w eb.pdf. See https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/ 10986/32639/9781464815324.pdf?sequence=6&isAllowed=y. Ibid. See https://fra.europa.eu/sites/default/files/fra-2014-roma-survey-employment_en.pdf. 5