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Women’s Empowerment and Its Limits: Setting the Scene

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Women’s Empowerment and Its Limits

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Abstract

In 2020, the sixty-fourth session of the United Nations (UN) Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) raised attention to the urgency of strengthening synergies between sustainability and gender by highlighting key areas (human rights/women’s empowerment/power asymmetries) that could serve as the roadmap to reviving state ambition in relation to these issue areas. Indeed, gender equality is “a necessary foundation for a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world”; many reports have been devoted to the linkages between sustainability and gender—for example those drafted by agencies of the UN, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Bank and the European Commission, just to mention a few—and the recurrent message is that sustainability and gender are “mutually reinforcing”, since “[a]chieving gender equality calls for looking beyond social and economic inequalities and diving deep into the disproportionate effects of systemic issues […] which could further exacerbate the former”. But how to include the gender dimension in the sustainability discourse in an efficient way? And how to address the persisting challenges, especially in the post-pandemic times?

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Notes

  1. 1.

    UN Sustainable Development Goals. 2015. Goal 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/gender-equality/. Accessed 1 November 2022.

  2. 2.

    OECD. 2021. Gender and the Environment. Building Evidence and Policies to Achieve the SDGs. https://www.oecd.org/env/gender-and-the-environment-3d32ca39-en.htm. Accessed 1 November 2022.

  3. 3.

    UN Women. UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs. 2021. Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals: The gender snapshot 2021. https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2021/09/progress-on-the-sustainable-development-goals-the-gender-snapshot-2021. Accessed 1 November 2022.

  4. 4.

    Commission on the Status of Women. 2020. Women’s Full and Effective Participation and Decision-Making in Public Life, as well as the Elimination of Violence, for Achieving Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women and Girls. Report of the Secretary-General. E/CN.6/2021/3; Hellum and Sinding Aasen (2013); Htun and Weldon (2018); Jaggar (2020); Charlesworth and Chinkin (2022).

  5. 5.

    Bosselmann (2011) and Fornalé (2022).

  6. 6.

    Tasli (2004); Batliwala (1994); Kabeer (1994); Rowlands (1995, 1997, 1998).

  7. 7.

    Collins and Bilge (CitationRef CitationID="CR12">2016</CitationRef>), p. 200.

  8. 8.

    In line with a report published by the UN Secretary General on Women in Development, “The crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has deepened gender inequalities in the world of work, decimating economic sectors where women workers are overrepresented and causing a shadow pandemic of escalating violence against women and girls”. UN Secretary General. 2022. Women in Development. UN Doc. A77/243; Campbell et al. (2020).

  9. 9.

    Nixon (2011).

  10. 10.

    Commission on the Status of Women. 2022. Sixty-sixth session. CSW66 (2022). https://www.unwomen.org/en/csw/csw66-2022. Accessed 1 November 2022.

  11. 11.

    For example Kabeer (2001); Moser (1989) and Rowland (1985).

  12. 12.

    D’Ignazio and Klein (2020); Collins and Bilge (CitationRef CitationID="CR12">2016</CitationRef>) and Fraser (1989).

  13. 13.

    Commission on the Status of Women. 2016. Women’s empowerment and the link to sustainable development. Agreed conclusions of the 2016 session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. CSW60 (2016). https://www.unwomen.org/en/csw/previous-sessions/csw60-2016. Accessed 1 November 2022.

  14. 14.

    van Eerdewijk, Anouka et al. 2017. White Paper: A Conceptual Model of Women and Girls’ Empowerment. KIT Gender, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. https://www.kit.nl/publication/white-paper-conceptual-model-of-women-and-girls-empowerment. Accessed 1 November 2022.

  15. 15.

    Tasli (2004); Kabeer (1994, 2001); Friedman (1992).

  16. 16.

    Commission on the Status of Women. 2020. Women’s Full and Effective Participation and Decision-Making in Public Life, as well as the Elimination of Violence, for Achieving Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women and Girls. Report of the Secretary-General. E/CN.6/2021/3.

  17. 17.

    Collins and Bilge (CitationRef CitationID="CR12">2016</CitationRef>).

  18. 18.

    For instance, the recent data provided by the Gender Social Norms Index (hdr.undp. org/sites/default/files/hd_perspectives_gsni.pdf) for the year 2020 confirm that gender equality has not been achieved in any country in the world (this tool is published by the United Nations Development Programme).

  19. 19.

    Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka. 2020. The Role of Digitalization in the Decade of Action. UNCTAD News. https://unctad.org/news/role-digitalization-decade-action. Accessed 1 November 2022.

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  1. World Trade Institute, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Elisa Fornalé

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  1. Elisa Fornalé
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Correspondence to Elisa Fornalé .

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  1. World Trade Institute, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Elisa Fornalé

  2. Institute of International Relations Prague, Praha 1, Czech Republic

    Federica Cristani

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Fornalé, E. (2023). Women’s Empowerment and Its Limits: Setting the Scene. In: Fornalé, E., Cristani, F. (eds) Women’s Empowerment and Its Limits. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29332-0_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29332-0_1

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