Equality in employment
While there has been great progress in recent decades in engaging women in the labour force, there has been considerably less advance on improving the conditions under which they work, recognising their unpaid work, eliminating discriminatory practices and laws related to property and inheritance rights, and providing support for childcare. Ensuring that women and men have equal opportunities to generate and manage income is an important step towards realising women’s rights. Moreover, children’s rights are more likely to be fulfilled when women fully enjoy their social and economic rights. One of the most important strategies for ensuring that boys and girls will have equal income-earning opportunities as adults is to give them equal access to education. All sectors of society, especially governments and parents must work together to ensure that schools are ‘girl-friendly’ through several measures that include making school facilities safe from gender-based violence; ensuring that schools have separate latrines for girls; and, allowing married adolescents and unmarried parents to attend classes. It is also important to implement policies aimed at altering stereotypical attitudes towards women at work, addressing underlying factors including sectoral and occupational segregation, and lack of education and training. Governments should undertake legislative, administrative and financial measures to create a strong and enabling environment for women’s entrepreneurship and participation in the labour market, including improved employment conditions; creating career development opportunities; eliminating pay gaps based solely on gender; and, providing safe, affordable, high-quality child-care arrangements. A further step towards ensuring women’s rights, greater public transparency and economic efficiency is the increasing use of gender-responsive budgets. Budget initiatives aimed at eliminating gender disparities focus on national, provincial and municipal processes and may cover the overall budget or only selected parts of it.
Women's Voices - Malaysia Women's Voices - Global Women & Children - The Double Dividend of Gender Equality |
