W20 to carry women’s voices all the way to G20 leaders in Buenos Aires
Women 20, a G20 engagement group focussed on women’s rights, will hold a public meeting in Buenos Aires in early October, prior to the G20 leaders summit on November 30 and December 1.
The observatory will meet to discuss ways to make progress on a range of proposals. NGOs and women’s and feminist organisations will also participate, as will the T20 (think tanks) and C20 (civil society groups).
The G20 is seeking to lower the gender pay-gap to 25 percent by 2025. The W20 believes an action plan is needed to achieve that goal. The only G20 engagement group that has not signed onto the commitment is the B20 (business), precisely the group with the strongest tools to push for change in the way of the gender pay-gap.
“We want to bring the voice of women to the G20, which is an economic and financial forum,” said Corina Rodríguez Enríquez, an economist and the head of the Economy and Gender programme at the FCE/UBA.
“Fiscal policies are relevant to ensuring there are public policies for equality”, she added.
“Twenty five percent by 2025 is the minimum. That gap must also have quality-driven aspirations with regards to the jobs that are created, and addressing that gap will only be possible if we don’t have to face economic models that destroy jobs or bring labour precarity.
“The evidence is very clear in showing how our social organisation continues being unfair [to women] because it reproduces the unequal distribution [of wealth],” she concluded.
The W20 has most recently been focussing on issues facing rural women.
“The access to land for women, transport infrastructure — because women walk, and a lot — digital inclusion, [and] the DNI were among some of the issues covered,” said Mabel Bianco, head of FEIM and the co-ordinator of the observatory.
The ENACOM regalotry body recently confirmed that small towns will have access to satellite internet connections. But for Monique Altscul “it’s not enough to secure women’s access to the internet like they have with mobile phones. We need to improve access to training for girls and teenagers, in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and to ensure the insertion of women in the digital world, which is currently very scare”.
Argentina will continue participating in the discussion of these issue during next year’s G20 activities in Japan, given that predecessors and successor host countries take on an active role in annual summits.
“The (W2O) sexual health panel was the most conflictive”, said Mariela Belski, head of Amnesty Interntaional Argentina. This debate has been pushed back to the W20’s meeting in March.
Proposals this year in sexual health focused on establishing friendly spaces for counseling; the decriminalisation of abortion and progress toward legal norms surrounding abortion; progress toward the approval of efficient medication; and guarantees surrounding integral sex education norms.
However, what was agreed to was bland: counselling, HIV prevention, and the implementation of integral sex education. And an agreement that women should not be criminalised for aborting.