After Beijing: emphasis on poverty eradication.

A "gender perspective" should be integrated by Governments and the private sector into policies and programmes dealing with poverty, child and dependent care, and the media, according to conclusions reached by the Commission on the Status of Women, meeting for the first time since the landmark 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing. Women's concerns, it stressed, had to be "mainstreamed" in order to help eliminate poverty, manage the impact of economic and social changes on families, and counter sexism and violence in the global media.

The Commission, capping its fortieth session (New York, 11-22 March) by adopting 17 resolutions, decisions, and "agreed conclusions", also recommended that the Economic and Social Council adopt a multi-year work programme for the Commission that would enable it to review, through the end of the century, the 12 critical areas of concern identified in the Beijing Platform for Action as the main obstacles to women's advancement. Those are: poverty; education; health; violence; armed conflict; economy; decision-making; institutional mechanisms; human rights; media; environment; and the girl child.

Established in 1946 as a subsidiary body of the Economic and Social Council, the 45-member Commission is the main inter-governmental body created by the UN to prepare recommendations and formulate policies on gender issues, monitor the status of women and promote their equality and rights. In 1995, the Fourth World Conference also assigned the Commission a central role within the UN system for monitoring the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action, and asked it to review the critical areas of concern and integrate follow-up to the Conference into its agenda.

While women had come a long way, they still had some distance to cover before all their goals were attained, the Secretary-General's Special Adviser on gender issues, Assistant Secretary-General Rosario Green, told the opening session. The Commission's efforts had to continue the work begun in Beijing so that women and men could address the next millennium's problems on the basis of equality, she emphasized.

The partnership of Governments, civil society and the UN, which had helped lead to the Beijing Conference, should now be built upon to press for further progress, Ms. Green declared. The "first partners" were Governments, on which the implementation of some decisions reached by the Commission would rest. Struggle at the national level should push ahead to ensure that Governments kept their commitments made at the Conference. Women's participation at all levels of decision-making would help secure the mainstreaming of women's issues, she stressed. (Ms. Green was designated Senior Adviser on 28 December 1995, to help the Secretary-General achieve the effective integration of gender perspective into UN policies and programmes.)

Angela King, Director of the UN Division for the Advancement of Women, at the opening meeting stressed that the Commission's entire agenda in the coming years should focus on the follow-up to the outcome of the Beijing Conference.

`Dialogues' tested

As part of an interactive approach that it hoped would lead to better implementation of recommendations made at Beijing, the Commission formed three expert panels to look into poverty, media, and child and dependent care. A dialogue format, in keeping with a general trend within the Council to eschew prepared statements that had previously characterized debates, gave Governments, the UN system, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and media representatives an opportunity to discuss practical issues relating to the Platform's implementation. Their findings were adopted as resolutions or "agreed conclusions".

Women and poverty

The Commission placed particular emphasis on how poverty affected women, stressing in the interactive debate the coordination of gender-based approaches to poverty eradication. A broad and integrated approach to tackling poverty was needed that went beyond the provision of resources and addressed such areas as reproductive health, violence, jobs and gender discrimination, the Commission asserted. Structural adjustment policies continued to have a negative impact on women.

In another resolution, the Commission stressed that women's empowerment and autonomy were essential for eradicating poverty, and their full and equal participation in decision-making at all levels should be an integral part of that process.

Legislative and administrative reforms must be undertaken to give women the right to inheritance, land ownership, credit and natural resources and technology. Their employment and self-employment should be promoted, and they should be given social and economic protection during unemployment, ill health, maternity, child-bearing, widowhood, disability and old age, the Commission urged.

Women and the media

In the dialogue on women and the media, experts agreed that the media had the power to shape the collective imagination. The globalization and concentration of media ownership had exacerbated existing female stereotyping, and the only way to counteract negative images of women in the media, some argued, was to increase women's involvement at all levels of communications.

A key question considered by the panel was whether the mass media provided an accurate account of the multiple roles of women in society. In a report to the Commission on the elimination of stereotyping in the mass media (E/CN.6/1996/4), Mr. Boutros-Ghali noted that "an analysis of sex roles and stereotypes indicates that women have been excluded or silenced in many media forms". The representation in the media of violence against women, particularly sexual violence, had increased tremendously in the past years, he said. Television deregulation, combined with transborder satellite channels, had brought with it a tenfold increase in televised pornography in Europe over the last decade.

"Despite increased attention to the fair portrayal of women in the media, there are not many success stories to report", the Secretary-General stated. While some steps had been taken to combat stereotyping, there had also been a significant backlash against those efforts. In the former socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the portrayal of women had gone from one extreme to the other, he pointed out. Previous images of political and working women had been supplanted by such images as the fashion model or beauty queen.

The Commission called for strengthening the role of women in global communications. In adopting agreed conclusion 1996/2, it declared that "self-regulatory mechanisms" by the media should be encouraged, as should other forms of self-regulation, in order to eliminate "gender-biased programming" and encourage non-stereotypical images of women. Media organizations should be encouraged to adopt voluntary "professional guidelines and codes of conduct", which should remain "consistent with freedom of expression".

Considering that an "enabling environment" needed to be created for women's media, the Commission also urged networks to strengthen their commitments to gender equality, and recommended that Governments review existing media policies and integrate a gender perspective into them.

Child and dependent care

Child and dependent care, including the sharing of work and family responsibility by men and women, was the subject of another panel, which concluded that since women and men were both responsible for families, Governments should promote greater participation by men in domestic work and child care. The social and economic importance of unremunerated work should also be recognized.

The Commission also urged that legal reforms must be carried out to prohibit gender discrimination in employment, promote maternity and parental leave, and enable women and men to reconcile their family and professional lives through the introduction of "flexitime".

Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali, in a report on child and dependent care (E/CN.6/1996/5), pointed to evidence that despite the fact that women's income was becoming increasingly necessary, there had been no corresponding reduction in their domestic responsibilities. Women accounted for a third of the global labour force, and estimates had women making up half the labour force in most countries by the year 2000. During the last several decades, he noted, women's share of the labour force had increased in almost all regions, while that of men had fallen.

Among the reasons cited for the rising proportion of female-headed households were the dissolution of marriages, migration and non-marital child-bearing, as well as the effects of drug and alcohol use by males. In countries ravaged by acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), caring for the rapidly growing number of children orphaned because of the epidemic had largely been left to women, whose family support network might already have been depleted by the disease. Some studies also suggested that men's unwillingness to marry or assume family responsibility, or their readiness to leave the household, was a result of their inability to support a family.

"Women's and men's use of time is different and unequal", the report stated. In both developed and developing countries, women--whether mothers or not--generally worked much longer than men. Women's increased participation in the work force had an impact on children, especially girls, and on relationships within the family, especially with men. "The double burden of working women could be a principal cause for their predominance in low status and low paid employment and often precarious working conditions, offering them little income, job security and prospects for advancement", Mr. Boutros-Ghali said.

Panel experts felt that traditional attitudes towards family responsibilities could be changed only when women's double burden of work at home and outside was recognized. Women, they stressed, made more sacrifices for the family and much of their domestic work went unpaid, but men did not make commensurate efforts in the home.

Draft optional protocol

The Commission also agreed to pursue further discussions of a possible draft optional protocol to the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). At its previous session, the Commission had recommended that the Economic and Social Council begin work on a draft that would introduce a right to petition or individual complaints procedures. The Women's Conference had asked Governments to support the initiative.

Although Mr. Boutros-Ghali reported (E/CN.6/1996/CRP:3) overwhelming support for the initiative, he also stressed that some States had voiced caution regarding the relationship between an optional protocol to CEDAW and complaints procedures already found in other human rights treaties.

The Commission asked the Secretary-General to invite Governments, NGOs and inter-governmental organizations to submit additional views on a draft optional protocol, and for him to submit a comprehensive report to the Commission's 1997 session. It also requested the Council to renew the mandate of the working group on the draft's elaboration.

Migrant workers, other measures

Acting on the plight of woman migrant workers, the Commission called on the UN Centre for Human Rights in Geneva to set up a mechanism that would help such workers assert their rights. It also called on countries to explore measures to prevent the victimization of women migrant workers by sexual traffickers and to adopt and implement legislation to eliminate violence against women.

If approved by the Council, a draft resolution would have the Commission consider, at its next session, education and training, women and the economy, women in power and decision-making, and women and the environment. It would also authorize the Commission to assist the Council "in monitoring, re viewing and appraising progress achieved and problems encountered" in implementing the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.

Buoyed by the success of the dialogue format, the Commission also declared that its effectiveness and efficiency could be improved "through innovative methods of work, including inviting experts to participate in the substantive debate on selected issues". Experts would be selected from fields addressed under the critical areas of concern. The dialogues, it decided, should yield "action-oriented agreed conclusions", with policy recommendations and identified coordination issues, that would be transmitted to the Council.

Among other actions, the Commission:

* Strongly urged parties to armed conflicts to take measures to protect women and children, in particular, to immediately release those taken hostage or imprisoned.

* Emphasized the need for the UN system to include gender-based human rights violations in their activities and to ensure that the equal status and the human rights of women and the girl child were integrated into the mainstream of system-wide activities.

* Called for measures to address the root factors that encourage trafficking in women and girls for prostitution, forced marriages and forced labour, and for Governments to ratify and enforce international conventions against slavery and trafficking in persons.

* Submitted a draft resolution to the Council that would demand that Israel comply with international human rights norms to protect the rights of Palestinian women and their families (adopted 36 in favour, to 1 against (United States), with 7 abstentions).