Austerity programs enacted after the 2008 global financial crisis, often featuring deep cuts in public spending, hurt women more than men and helped to reinforce rising income inequality, the UN said.
A report from the UN women’s empowerment division on Monday looked at how broad policy measures taken by governments can have unequal and often gender-specific consequences — but do not have to.
“Macroeconomic policies can pursue a broader set of goals, including gender equality and social justice,” UN Women said in the 337-page report entitled Progress of the World’s Women 2015: Transforming Economies, Realizing Rights.
Instead, women, who globally earn 24 percent less than men, struggle for access to better quality jobs and the valuable benefits often associated with those jobs, such as pensions, UN Women said.
Women in all countries also work longer hours than men, if unpaid domestic work is added to paid work, the report said.
Post-crisis macroeconomic policies attempted to stabilize markets and economies, often by enacting deep cuts to social services, but did so without also tackling existing gender divisions, the report said.
“Broad-based economic policies do have gender-specific effects, because these policies interact with structural features of the economy, such as the distribution of unpaid work, and the segregation of women and men into different types of employment, to produce distinctly gendered outcomes,” UN Women said.
Meanwhile, cuts in developing countries often affected basic services such as food, fuel, electricity and transport subsidies, which women are more heavily reliant on, the report said.
While many countries continue to experience low growth and high unemployment, joblessness hits young women the hardest, as gender stereotypes leave women more vulnerable to occupational segregation or limit them to unpaid domestic work, the report said.
In the EU, one quarter of women compared with just 3 percent of men cited childcare and other family responsibilities as the reason for not working, according to 2013 data from the Center for Economic and Social Rights cited in the report. The presence of young children in the household was linked to lower employment rates for women, but higher rates for men in the developing world and in Mexico.
Forty-six percent of Mexican women between the ages of 25 and 34 in households with very young children were in the labor force in 2010 versus 55 percent of women in households without children, according to UN Women data. The figures for men were 99 percent and 96 percent.
Globally, women hold 64 percent of clerical and support positions, and 55 percent of service and sales roles against 33 percent of managerial occupations, according to this year’s data from the UN International Labor Organization cited in the report.
Women are also underrepresented in skilled work, holding 17 percent of craft and trade occupations, and 37 percent of agriculture and fisheries, the UN said.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not