Gender in Europe & CIS

Human development, as a process of enlarging people’s choices, cannot occur when the choices of half of humanity are restricted. Targeted actions aimed at empowering women and righting gender inequities in the social and economic sphere, as well as in terms of civil and political rights, must be taken alongside efforts to integrate the different needs of men and women into the development process.

 

Challenges in Europe and the CIS include economic empowerment/opportunities of women; women’s access to assets/impact of privatization; political participation; migration/trafficking; domestic violence; inadequate capacity to implement gender equality legislation and to comply with international reporting obligations. Some regional endeavours to address these issues include:

 

Lack of respect for women's rights in the workplace negatively affects women's economic security. In recent years, many countries in the region have adopted Gender Equality Laws (GELs) in order to address discrimination against women within and outside the workplace. However, the evidence shows that these laws are often not being implemented or enforced. This is due to a variety of reasons, including lack of knowledge about the law, low priority being given to the law, weak capacity on the part of implementing bodies, and limited resources allocated to implementation. A joint UNDP/UNIFEM project, implemented in close cooperation with the International Labour Organization (ILO), is addressing several of these important issues.

 

Over 10 years have passed since the United Nations formally recognized that gender equality is necessary to ensure equitable and sustainable human development. Since then, the integration of a gender perspective into programming and policy-making – Gender Mainstreaming – has become a key priority. To help implement this mandate, the Bratislava Regional Centre has published Gender Mainstreaming in Practice: A Toolkit. It presents the methodology behind gender mainstreaming based on best practices, and provides examples of how gender mainstreaming can be implemented through policy-making and programming across Europe, the CIS, and beyond.