Republic of Armenia Leveling the stem playing Field for Women
EQUALITY FOR MEN AND WOMEN AT WORK
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EQUALITY FOR MEN AND WOMEN AT WORK“We now know what must be in the last metaphoric chapter…It must involve considerable economic change, not a Band-Aid with firms offering flexible hours and schedules to workers in return for lower compensation. To get from here to there, temporal flexibility must become less expensive for firms.” Claudia Goldin 2015 Mainstreaming gender Sweden is currently one of the most gender-egalitarian societies in the world, and has consistently addressed equality between women and men in national policies since the 1970s. Since 1994, gender mainstreaming has been the main feature and is currently the principle strategy for achieving Sweden’s national policy objectives for equality between women and men. According to the Swedish government, “gender mainstreaming means that decisions in all policy areas are to be permeated by a gender equality perspective,” including the allocation of resources and the establishment of standards.
Absolute equality between the sexes in terms of time might be an unobtainable goal given childbirth. Will we ever live in a world where men and women have the same time constraints, the same care and household obligations, and therefore the same amount of time to spend on paid work? Goldin (2015) suggests that it would be easier in the short term to change the nature of jobs, rather than people, and that what is needed are “changes in how jobs are structured and remunerated, enhancing the flexibility of work schedules.” To succeed, these changes would have to decrease employers’ costs in substituting the hours of one worker for another. The gender pay gap would vanish if long, inflexible work days and weeks were no longer seen by employers as the optimal route to profitability—that is, if firms did not have a financial incentive to pay employees working 80 hours a week more than twice what they would receive for 40-hour weeks. An experiment in Holland showed that when a few men in high-paid positions started experimenting with part-time work, acceptance of the practice gradually increased, and that the changes were faster in companies where men were in managerial positions (Bennhold 2010). The ability to change the patriarchal structure of capitalism might seem a long way off, but in fact the costs of temporal flexibility have begun to fall in some sectors—notably, technology, science, and health. Pushing competitive labor markets to generate more linearity of earnings with respect to the number of hours worked, and when they were logged, will remove the time penalty placed on women. Many of the technology and science occupations have built-in flexibility because work projects are often conducted independently and are highly specific, requiring less oversight. The spread of information systems has led to change in other sectors, enhancing substitutability across workers.
Reducing gender-based legal restrictions and promoting the use of women’s talent in the labor force allows women to choose the opportunities that are best for them, their families, and their communities. Better rule of law is associated with having more gender-equal laws on the books. Empowering women legally may have similar effects to empowering them politically, allowing them to better reflect their preferences in decision making (IFC 2016). Moreover, evidence suggests that after women were granted the right to vote, legislative decisions differed in such areas as child welfare and spending on public health. This may be because elected officials better incorporated women’s preferences within their legislative agendas once women became a significant part of the electorate. For example, a study examining state voting rights for women in the United States found that within a year of voting rights being granted to women, voting patterns shifted to incorporate greater local public health spending by about 35 percent. This allowed for greater emphasis on local public health campaigns for issues such as hygiene, leading to a decrease in infectious childhood diseases and a decline in childhood mortality of about 8–15 percent. Access to land Although efforts to secure women’s land rights must include the passage of gender-equal laws, this is just a first step to realizing equality. Even in those countries where constitutions mandate the equality of men and women before the law, failure to implement, or the procedures used by land administration institutions often discriminate against women, either explicitly or implicitly. To overcome this tendency, a more proactive stance in favor of awarding land rights to women by governments, together with more rigorous evaluation of innovative approaches aiming to accomplish greater equality between women and men in control of conjugal land on the ground, would be warranted (Deininger 2003). Advocacy and awareness campaigns to draw attention to the importance of gender issues in land policy, as well as measures to make women aware of their rights and to provide them with legal aid, are required (Gopal and Salim 1998). Technology can also be deployed strategically to address structural exclusions such as the denial of land rights to women. In Togo, property rights education was delivered through mobile phones, and used to build dispersed learning networks (Gurumurthy and Chami 2014).40 And e‐registration of services can bring gains for women’s strategic interests: by making co‐ownership of land or co‐stewardship of leased natural resources between husband and wife a compulsory requirement in the digitization of records, public systems can tacitly promote equitable ownership of resources even it is only “on paper” (Ibid). Access to Finance The progress made in digital financial services has been heralded as one of the most important means to accelerate access to financial services for women. Since the mid‐2000s, mobile money transfers have emerged as a pathway to financial inclusion, evoking considerable interest from international funding organizations. In the past decade, mobile phone money transfer services that use text messaging and a network of retail outlets as cash‐in/cash‐out points have proliferated. At present, over 150 such mobile money deployment services are in existence, many of which are still expanding the reach of the financial sector to hitherto unbanked pockets in developing country contexts (GSMA Association 2015). One of the more obvious places to improve women’s access to finance is to target salaried workers who receive salaries in cash. The other is to leverage the existing payments from governments to poor people—such as conditional cash transfers or pensions. Findex estimates that 80 million women are recipients of social benefits or wages in cash. Working with governments and the private sector to transfer these payments to bank accounts would be a significant step in expanding financial services (Findex 2014).41
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