Report by Martha Coleman of the Coalition for Equal Value Equal Pay

I attended a workshop on time use surveys organised by UNDP (United Nations Development Programme), which included speakers from the UN Statistics Division, World Bank, Office of Status of Women Canada and UNDP.

The UN speakers reported on the efforts underway around the world to measure women's work so as to properly judge women's contribution to the economy. They reported that literacy issues meant non-traditional methods of data collection were needed. Definitions of work also provided problems - for example, people working in subsistence production do not consider themselves to be engaged in work.

The three categories of work which were identified were regular, well established employment; primary production; and services, including petty trading and homework. Six other groups of non-labour force work were also used. These were shopping, household maintenance, childcare, eldercare, community services and help to other households.

The World Bank speaker talked about the living standard measurement survey that had been developed which included questions on attitudes to gender issues in order to correlate these to findings about work. The survey, based on the cut flower industry in Ecuador, showed that men worked only 70 per cent of the time women worked and that women work slightly less if they have access to paid work.

The Canadian speaker reported that the information they collected had changed the public dialogue, for example in the way that work and family issues had entered public discourse, but had yet to have an impact on policy development.

A seminar on women in law and politics was organised by the International Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA), to report on activities by their members from the US, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and Israel.

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The focus in each country was different, but the issues could nonetheless be linked by the theme of women, families and violence. In Africa, the focus was on the impact of customary laws such as customary servitude, lack of inheritance rights to family property, polygamy and AIDS. All countries shared concerns over violence against women, particularly domestic violence, and over non-enforcement of equality laws that did exist.

In most of the countries FIDA members combined involvement in litigation with policy work, including at a political level.

The focus of the workshop on organising for equality, jobs and justice in the global economy was on the position of women in developing countries and the effects of globalisation. These included widening wealth gaps in and between countries, the fact that women were more exploited than men, diminishing labour standards and protections and the collapse of social security programmes.

The ILO workshop on decent work for women also carried the theme that globalisation has not brought benefits to all, especially not to women, given the strong link between gender and poverty. The ILO is promoting a decent work concept which was described as an integrated framework incorporating respect for fundamental rights and protections at work, social dialogue, employment creation and extending social protection for income and environmental protection.

Various speakers talked about ILO-sponsored projects in their regions. One idea reported on was monitoring the coverage of women's work issues in daily newspapers as part of developing their analysis of how to better integrate gender and labour perspectives into ordinary social, political and policy discourse.

There was a special session of the Women and Armed Conflict Caucus devoted to the position in Fiji and the Solomon Islands. The main report regarding Fiji came from representatives from the Fiji Women's Rights Movement, a multi-ethnic organisation which receives considerable funding from Oxfam New Zealand. They had been working largely at a policy level, but the coup had caused them to reassess and refocus on the grass roots, to work with women in the villages on human rights issues. They reported, for example, that the new constitution had not really been translated from English and had not been the subject of public education. They were also wanting to learn from the experiences of women in other countries who had been through similar experiences. The responses stressed the need for women to be involved in all stages of conflict resolution, from peace-making to peacekeeping.

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The German Permanent Mission to the UN organised a workshop on legal and social advisory services for women which reported on women's projects funded by Germany as part of their commitment to women in developing countries, following Beijing.

The lessons arising out of these projects were that there is no standard procedure for empowerment because of women's diversity, that cuts in social services hit women harder, and that a gender perspective needs women to have a sense of their own value.

What was particularly impressive about the report was the transparency of the German government programmes - both to women in Germany and to women in the international community.

A speaker from Turkey and one from Kenya then outlined in more detail the German-sponsored projects they were working on. The Kenyan speaker spoke of the impact the Beijing Platform had on their work in African countries in campaigning to repeal explicitly discriminatory laws. Other concerns she mentioned were trafficking in women and girls, violence against women, customary servitude of mainly girls to appease family wrongs, the lack of inheritance rights for women and the gap between formal rights and actual practice.

Closing this gap was the main focus of the Turkish human rights legal literacy training programme for women. Aimed at women in shanty towns around big cities and in south-eastern Turkey, which is experiencing armed conflict, this project seeks to empower women through working with groups of women in these areas. They start with personal experience and then analyse this in terms of which laws (customary or legal) might work to help or hinder the situation. Examples of positive results were women who organised public transport to the shanty towns, women who won the right to wear trousers, and women who won the right not to be married.

I also attended a session with the Women's Legal Defence and Education Fund, which works at both a policy and legislative level and is involved in impact litigation either as counsel or in an amicus capacity. It is presently working on sexual harassment, violence against women, childcare, economic justice, equal pay and judicial education.

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