Women and the economy
women, and effectively improve women's skills
and broaden women's access to career choices, in
particular in science, new technologies and other
potential and innovative areas of expansion in
terms of employment.
Governments, international organizations and the
private sector should recognize the contributions
women make to economic growth through
their paid and unpaid work and as employers,
employees and entrepreneurs. They should adopt
the following:
4. Economic policies and structural adjustment
programmes, including liberalization policies,
should include privatization, financial and trade
policies, should be formulated and monitored
in a gender-sensitive way, with inputs from the
women most impacted by these policies, in order
to generate positive results for women and men,
drawing on research on the gender impact of
macroeconomic and micro-economic policies.
Governments should ensure, inter alia, that macroeconomic policies, including financial and public
sector reforms, and employment generation, are
gender-sensitive and friendly to small-scale and
medium-sized enterprises. Local-level regulations
and administrative arrangements should be conducive to women entrepreneurs.It is the responsibility
of Governments to ensure that women are not
discriminated against in times of structural change
and economic recession.
1. Governments, international organizations, the
private sector, non governmental organizations,
social partners (employers' organizations and
labour unions) should adopt a systematic and
multifaceted approach to accelerating women's
full participation in economic decision-making at
all levels and ensure the mainstreaming of a gender
perspective in the implementation of economic
policies, including economic development policies
and poverty eradication programmes. To this end,
Governments are urged to enhance the capacity of
women to influence and make economic decisions
as paid workers, managers, employers, elected officials, members of non-governmental organizations
and unions, producers, household managers and
consumers. Governments are encouraged to conduct a gender analysis of policies and programmes
that incorporates information on the full range
of women's and men's paid and unpaid economic
activity.Governments, international organizations,
particularly the International Labour Organization
(ILO), the private sector and non-governmental
organizations, should develop and share case studies and best practices of gender analysis in policy
areas that affect the economic situation of women.
5. Governments should ensure that women's rights,
particularly those of rural women and women
living in poverty, are being promoted and implemented through their equal access to economic
resources, including land, property rights, right to
inheritance, credit and traditional savings schemes,
such as women's banks and cooperatives.
6. The international community should actively sup-
port national efforts for the promotion of microcredit schemes that ensure women's access to credit,
self-employment and integration into the economy.
2. In order to ensure women's empowerment in the
economy and their economic advancement, adequate mobilization of resources at the national and
international levels, as well as new and additional
resources to the developing countries from all available funding mechanisms, including multilateral,
bilateral and private sources, for the advancement
of women, will also be required.
7. Microcredit schemes should be supported and
monitored in order to evaluate their efficiency in
terms of their impact on increasing women's economic empowerment and well-being, income-earning capacity and integration into the economy.
8. Governments, the private sector and those organi-
3. Governments should promote and support the
zations in civil society that provide training services that promote a gender balance in terms of
education and participation in economic activity,
should focus on institutional capacity-building and
elimination of biases in the educational system
so as to counteract the gender segregation of
the labour market, enhance the employability of
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