Johannesburg - Type Beijing+20 into Google’s search prompt and you will immediately find chinalovecupid.com/ Beijing. It claims to have more than a million members, women aged from 18 to 24.
But there’s no point in viewing that site – or joining, free of course – if you’re looking for the real Beijing+20.
That’s because chinalovecupid, to some extent, represents the opposite of what the 17 000 delegates and 30 000 activists who gathered in the Chinese capital in September 1995 hoped to have achieved by now.
Representatives of 189 countries went there for the Fourth World Conference on Women, and the event became legendary for its commitment to a future of equality for women. It was a big ask. After all, Utopian socialist and French philosopher Charles Fourier coined the word “feminism” way back in 1837 and his country did not give women the right to vote until 1944.
The only world leader to take up the word in law was Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser who in 1956 introduced “state feminism”, which outlawed gender discrimination and gave women the right to vote. That hasn’t meant Egyptian women today enjoy equal or full human rights, however – and the same is true of most countries.
After two weeks of fevered debate, wrangling, hustling and lobbying, a deadline was set in Beijing in 1995 for 20 years thence, for the achievement of this goal. There was real excitement around the prospects for 2015.
Yet today, on International Women’s Day, the disappointment – if not anger – is palpable.
UN Women executive director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, who was South Africa’s deputy president from 2005 to 2008, confirmed last week that not a single country that sent a representative to Beijing had achieved equality.
The +20 time frame has all but been ignored.
The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, a progressive blueprint to which all the delegates committed themselves and their countries, was not composed of dreams but plans to achieve goals.
Among these was a decline of 75 percent in the maternal mortality rate. Since 1995, it has declined 45 percent. There has been some progress but, in an area many of us with private health care take for granted, nowhere near enough.
Coupled with the maternal mortality goal was a plan to achieve the universal availability of contraception and family planning. At least 140 million women continue not to have access to these.
In the waged or salaried employment, which is so crucial to women and the world’s liberation, there has been a rise of only about 10 percent on the 40 percent of women worldwide. And that’s only an estimate.
So the UN Women got feistier on Friday, calling on countries to “step it up for gender equality”.
Mlambo-Ngcuka is looking for substantive progress by 2020, with the aim of achieving Planet 50:50 before 2030.
Of course, a major difficulty here is that UN Women struggles with the same problems as many other UN agencies, in that it has no legal force on the ground.
That’s one of the main reasons why those 189 countries represented in Beijing have got away with letting us down. Their governments simply didn’t care enough – and had nothing to fear.
Let us not forget that our own government is one of those.
Although the first democratic Parliament had been sitting for only a year when Beijing+20 took place, there have been four presidents – give or take a presidential recall and an interim president – who could have driven South Africa’s response. So could political parties, especially the ANC, now in its fifth term since that key conference in China.
Even the debate our MPs had about International Women’s Day on Thursday was, quite simply, trite. Later that day, Parliament took a blow around the topic when the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the global organisation of national parliaments, released its annual statistics, showing South Africa had dropped two places in the world rankings of women’s representivity in government – we just scraped into the top 10, in 10th spot.
Rwanda, where nearly 64 percent of the members of the lower parliamentary chamber are women, holds the top spot, followed by Bolivia. In South Africa, eighth a year ago, 42.5 percent of MPs are women.
Happily, this is one area where progress has been sparked since Beijing. The global average of the proportion of women in parliaments has increased from a paltry 11.3 percent in 1995 to 22.1 percent. Too low, but on an upward creep.
The movement towards women’s liberation still needs champions.
The speech given at the Oscars by Patricia Arquette, this year’s best supporting actress, had some significance. She spoke about pay parity for women, using the wage differential in Hollywood as a vehicle. Although her speech was as praised for its activism as it was derided for being too white and too straight in its feminism, Arquette gained some attention for the issues.
She said: “To every woman who gave birth to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody’s equal rights. It is our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America.”
But that attention quickly passed and now we are all back to normal. Or are we? What is normal for a woman in the world, on this international day?
Global woman leaders gathered under the slogan, “We have waited long enough!”, in Santiago, Chile, last month to develop a fresh call to action. They urged governments and the private sector to take stronger measures to close the gap of inequalities to achieve the goals of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.
It didn’t take them two weeks, but two days of analysis to determine that progress had been slow and uneven. Significant inequalities persist between women and men.
The introduction to their Call to Action is unsettling.
It says: “At the current pace of change, it will take 81 years to achieve gender parity in the workplace, more than 75 years to reach equal remuneration between men and women for work of equal value, and more than 30 years to reach gender balance in decision-making.”
In her closing address, Chile’s President Michelle Bachelet was more positive. She correctly said: “Women and men are called to speed up the changes to achieve full equality… We have a commitment with the new generation and to ensure that girls who are being born will not endure a lifetime of discrimination.”
The Call to Action focuses on renewed political commitment to implement fully the 12 critical areas of the Beijing Platform. It has been given a further five years, with a target date of 2020.
The areas are, broadly, the empowerment of women, the realisation of the human rights of women and girls, the expiry of gender inequality by 2030, and an end to the funding gap on gender equality.
All voices in Santiago emphasised the need for implementation. Fists raised, they say their voices will be even louder at the 59th session of the Commission on the Status of Women, in New York this week.
Sunday Independent