The 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women approved a Platform for Action that includes major advances for women in the areas of violence against women, health, economic equity, and the rights of girls.The new Platform calls for valuing women’s unwaged work in national economic accounting systems. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has estimated that sex discrimination costs women $11 trillion in unwaged and underpaid work worldwide. The Platform also contains, at the urging of the Feminist Majority Foundation, language calling for the use of gender neutral criteria in job evaluation.
Provisions declaring that "the rights of women include their right to have control over and decide freely about matters related to their own sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion, discrimination and violence" advanced the Platform beyond other international documents in the areas of sexual and reproductive rights.
The Platform also recognized unsafe abortion as a public health concern. The concerted efforts of the Feminist Majority Foundation, Union Suisse Pour Decriminaliser l’Avortement and abortion rights groups resulted in a new provision urging countries to consider reviewing punitive laws against women who have had illegal abortions.
The promotion and protection of the universal human rights of women, the definition of rape as a war crime, and the condemnation of other forms of gender-based violence such as genital mutilation, domestic violence, marital rape, and dowry-related violence also appear in the Platform for Action.
The rights of girls and young women to privacy, confidentiality, and respect are affirmed in platform language that seeks to provide protections for young women in situations varying from being sold into sexual slavery to reproductive health decisions.
NGOs and governments scored a major victory in preventing Islamic countries from including language that would have allowed a country’s religious or cultural practices to supersede the Platform for Action. The Platform calls for gender balance in governmental bodies, public administrative entities, the judiciary, United Nations bodies and agencies.
Despite these wins, several potential advances for women were blocked or seriously diluted. For example, references to prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation were dropped from the Platform during the final hours of negotiation because of the objections of the Vatican and Islamic countries.
Strong objections by the U.S., U.K., Japan, Germany, Italy, Canada, and France to recognizing the negative impact of structural adjustment on women resulted in the absence of such language in the Platform. The same countries opposed an NGO proposal to reduce multi-lateral debt (debt owed to financial institutions) for middle and low-income countries.
Forty-one nations announced reservations to approximately 20 parts of the Platform for Action, mostly in the areas of sexual and reproductive rights. These dissenting delegations included the Vatican and countries controlled by Catholic or Islamic religious forces.
Commitments to Women
For the first time at a UN Conference on women, over 90 of 184 governments made concrete national commitments for improving the status of women.
*Women’s Equality: Nations pledged to join in ratifying the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) (South Africa, U.S); other countries promised to remove reservations from CEDAW (Turkey) and monitor implementation of CEDAW (Latvia).
* Equal Education: Extend compulsory primary education from 5 to 8 years (Turkey); increasing primary school enrollment from 18% to 100% (Tanzania).
* Women’s Health: Promote reproductive health programs for youth (Malawi) including school-based programs (U.S.); conduct and fund contraceptive research and development, with special emphasis on RU 486 and other promising technologies (U.S.).
*Women’s Economic Empowerment: Create a Women’s Bank to increase women’s access to credit (Cote d’Ivoire); establish and increase daycare centres (Ghana) (U.K); enact legislation protecting women’s property rights (Nepal).
* Violence Against Women: Grant political asylum to women who have been victims of sexual violence (Austria); pass laws to protect women against sexual harassment (Belize); open a center for young women victims of violence and sexual abuse (Luxembourg).
* Women’s Political Participation: Bring gender parity to peace negotiation and conflict resolution delegations (Cambodia); and attain 50% participation of women of boards, committees, councils and political appointments by 1999 (Fiji).
* Financial Resource Pledges: Contribute over 1% of Gross National Product to international development with emphasis of the role of women (Denmark); provide funding to NGOs in Pacific Island nations to the Implement the Platform for Action (Australia).
A ten person delegation -- ranging in age from 14 to 50 and including members from the U.S., Kenya, and France — represented the Feminist Majority Foundation at the Fourth World Conference on Women and the NGO Forum. The 30,000 women attending the NGO Forum and 17,000 participants in the official government conference produced the largest-ever gathering of the international feminist movement."Five times more women participated in the Fourth World Conference on Women than attended the first U.N. Women’s Conference in Mexico City in 1975," said Dr. Jennifer Jackman, Director of Policy and Research, who served as the Feminist Majority Foundation Delegation’s official spokesperson in China. "These numbers reflect the enormous growth of the women’s movement throughout the world,"
Along with Jackman, Colleen Dermody, Director of Media Relations, and Christine Onyango, Director of the Women’s Empowerment and Population Project, provided leadership for the delegation in Beijing and Huairou, holding panels at the NGO Forum and communicating daily reports to the United States for the Foundation’s new World Wide Web site. Professor Elizabeth Spahn of the New England School of Law and Onyango served as the Foundation’s official delegates to the government conference.
Dr. Catherine Euvrard, Director of Communications and Scientific Relations for Roussel Uclaf, traveled from France to join the Feminist Majority Foundation’s delegation and to serve on the Foundation’s panel on Achieving Gender Balance in the Workplace. Euvrard is a 1994 Feminist of the Year Award recipient.
Young women were well-represented on the Feminist Majority delegation. Alia Khan, 22, Program Assistant at the Foundation, helped lead efforts to increase the influence and visibility of youth at the official government conference. Erica Spahn Mena at 14 was the youngest member of the Feminist Majority Foundation delegation and one of the youngest delegates to the NGO Forum. The delegation also included Foundation interns Miranda Johnson of Dartmouth College and Sarah Lunt of Eureka College.
Sheri O’Dell, former National Organization for Women Vice President Action and a writer for the fundraising firm Craver, Matthews and Smith, also served as a member of the Feminist Majority Foundation’s Beijing delegation.
The Feminist Majority Foundation conducted a series of five intense and inspiring panels that brought together women from around the world at the Non-Governmental Organizations Forum (NGO Forum) in Huairou, China to discuss strategies for gender balance in the workplace, RU 486, women’s empowerment through media, gender balance in politics, and implementing hard-won government agreements.Each standing-room-only session included representatives of women’s organizations, researchers, and other feminist advocates from around the world. The panels focused on identifying the problems and designing campaigns to counter the backlash against equality for women worldwide.
In a Feminist Majority Foundation session entitled "Achieving Gender Balance In The Workplace," panelists from the United Kingdom, Norway, France, Korea, Australia, and the United States shared stories of the economic and political forces that have stalled women’s progress in the labor force in their countries. Affirmative action, the six-hour work day, pay equity, and public education campaigns were several of the strategies identified by feminist activists to gender balance in the workforce.
Describing a successful private sector equal employment opportunity initiative at a major French pharmaceutical firm, Dr. Catherine Euvrard, Director of Communications and Scientific Relations for Roussel Uclaf, discussed how training, hiring and promotion, and corporate communications programs have increased the number of women in management positions at the company and opened more opportunities to women at all levels. Even with these path-breaking programs, Euvrard remains concerned that "it is as if junior posts are being reserved for women and senior positions for men."
In another highly regarded panel, researchers, physicians, and feminist advocates from developing and industrialized countries discussed the use of RU 486 as a method of early abortion. (See RU 486 article in this newsletter.)
At the Feminist Majority Foundation session on how to influence media coverage for the feminist movement worldwide, panelists from Uganda, India, Australia, New Zealand, France and the United States first spoke to and then heard from a highly motivated crowd of participants. Strategies for changing the amount and quality of press coverage for women included developing alternative media to reframe the debate around serious issues for women.
Translating victories from the International Conference on Population and Development to the UN Fourth World Conference On Women was the subject of yet another well-attended session sponsored by the Feminist Majority Foundation. Women from the U.S., Bangladesh, and Zambia examined and discussed the political and economic obstacles to implementation agreements from the 1994 conference, especially in the area of reproductive health, and lessons those challenges hold for implementing agreements from the Beijing conference.
The Feminist Majority Foundation’s final workshop on "Achieving Gender Balance in Politics" featured panelists from Zimbabwe, Switzerland, Uganda and the United States. The Hon. Beatrice Bakojja, a member of the Ugandan Parliament, identified the main obstacles to women’s political participation in Uganda as cultural, educational and financial. Panelists from other countries as well as audience participants related similar experiences.
Members of the Feminist Majority Foundation delegation who participated in the workshops agreed that one theme stood out. Women from every part of the world -- from industrialized or developing nations, from countries with democratic or other forms of government, or from areas in which the press is privately-owned or government-run -- face extraordinarily similar challenges to achieving equality that can be overcome by the concerted work of women inside and outside of governments, inside and outside of corporations, and across national boundaries.
A high quality of life depends more on a high status for women than on a country’s wealth, according to a new report by the Center for Partnership Studies in Pacific Grove, CA.Women, Men, and the Global Quality of Life analyzed data on quality of life and status of women for 89 countries, and found a high correlation between quality of life variables such as infant mortality, life expectancy, and health care, and gender equity variables like female literacy and life expectancy, women in politics, and girls’ school enrollment.
The report compares countries with similar per capita Gross Domestic Products (GDP), but which have very different quality of life scores. For example, France and Kuwait have an almost identical GDP, yet in Kuwait 19 babies out of 1,000 babies die in their first year, compared to only 8 out of 1,000 in France. The difference is that France rates high on a scale of equality for women, whereas Kuwait rates low.
Young women and men attended the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in unprecedented numbers this past September, joining their older counterparts in lobbying delegates, caucusing and networking. The 4,000 participants under 25 years old at the Conference and parallel Non-Governmental Organizations Forum (NGO Forum) made a collective statement to the world that the younger generation is the future of the international feminist movement: they are the beneficiaries of its accomplishments and the implementors of its goals.Eighty-five of the youth participants were on official governmental delegations. The United States, Bangladesh, South Africa, Canada, Jordan, and Australia were among the 53 governments who brought young women into the decision-making process at the conference.
Twenty-two-year-old Alia Khan, a Feminist Majority Foundation delegate at the NGO Forum who helped coordinate youth activities at the Conference and Preparatory Meetings, said, "While much of the work is yet to be done to fully integrate youth participation and concerns into public policy, the Fourth World Conference on Women is a milestone that marks the energy, potential and success of young people as actors and purveyors of social change."
Conference Secretary General Gertrude Mongella, appointed a Youth Advisor, Sherrill Whittington of Australia, to coordinate the Conference Secretariat’s efforts to encourage governments to bring youth with them to Beijing. Working with funds from the Inter-American Development Bank, Ms. Whittington offered sponsorships to youth delegates from less-developed countries.
Meanwhile at the NGO Forum, Zonny Woods of the NGO Forum Planning Committee coordinated activities in the Youth Tent,which hosted workshops to teach young women leadership, networking and media skills, alongside video showings, cultural exchanges and consciousness raising.
The biggest success of youth lobbying was paragraph forty-two of the mission statement of the document, which stated that women 18-25 have unique concerns that are different from girls’ concerns and older women’s concerns.