Looking Ahead to CSW 2024
Rangita de Silva de Alwis
The theme of this year’s annual meeting of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) is “accelerating the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls by addressing poverty and strengthening institutions and financing with a gender perspective.”
Poverty has historically been measured in monetary terms, such as wage disparity and GDP per capita. However, access to resources, opportunity, and a role in decision-making should be part of the poverty calculus as well. According to the World Bank’s Women, Business and Law Report 2023, only 14 countries in the world offer women as many legal protections as men. Several countries still retain male-only heads of household laws and husband obedience laws. Meanwhile, the share of women in legislative assemblies globally hovers around 25 percent. This stark inequality in law and political voice contributes to poverty among women. During its meeting from March 11-22, therefore, CSW must focus not only on increasing wealth, but also on increasing opportunity and capabilities for women.
The CSW must, then, focus not only on increasing wealth, but also on increasing opportunity and capabilities for women.
Recognition of the linkages among poverty, opportunity, and capabilities can be found across UN documents. The International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights defines poverty as a human condition characterized by sustained or chronic deprivation of resources and capabilities. Sustainable Development Goal Target 5.5 calls upon governments to “ensure women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision making in political, economic, and public life.”
The expert committee that monitors implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), on which I sit, is drafting a general recommendation that will call for advancing women’s leadership and decision-making. This recommendation, led by Nicole Ameline, the former minister of parity in France, will include calling for a threshold level of 50:50 gender parity in decision-making in order to remedy the lag in equal opportunity for leadership at all levels of government, the marketplace, and society. The new General Recommendation 40, due to be issued at the end of 2024, will be as important to addressing poverty reduction as macroeconomic policies.
This core principle that equality and women’s leadership is essential to poverty reduction is at the center of my mission, CEDAW’s mission, and the mission of the CSW 2024. This analysis also finds parallels in the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen. In Development as Freedom, Sen argues that economic development is about more than increasing wealth—it must be about expanding freedom. Poverty is not only about the lack of income; it’s also about the lack of rights. Sen further argues, “Nothing is as important in the global economy of development as the leadership of women.”
This understanding requires finding broader alternatives to primarily economic metrics such as measuring development through GDP or per capita income alone. Rather, this approach involves an understanding of human freedoms and autonomy in self-actualization. The World Bank now defines poverty as a “pronounced deprivation of well-being” and focuses on the capability of individuals to function in society. However, we continue to face challenges in measuring this multidimensional poverty. Nine of the 14 indicators used to measure progress toward Sustainable Development Goal 1 (no poverty), measure monetary aspects of poverty.
To be sure, monetary measures of women’s poverty are important. According to the World Economic Forum’s 2023 Global Gender Gap Report, women globally earn around 37% less than men in similar roles. A survey of 34 developing nations by the UN Food and Agricultural Organization estimates that the share of the world’s land owned by women may be as low as 10%. At the same time women make up approximately 43% to 50% of the agricultural labor force. For several years, I served on the board of directors of Landesa, the world's largest land rights organization. The transformative impact for women of gaining land rights has an additive effect on all other rights in the CEDAW, including rights in the family, health rights, educational rights, and women’s rights to political participation and decision-making in public life. Even more ambitiously, women have to call for equal decision-making rights in the global economy, defined as international trade, foreign direct investment, capital market flows, movement of labor, and diffusion of technology.
Even more ambitiously, women have to call for equal decision-making rights in the global economy.
Ultimately, then, I hope that at CSW 2024 anti-poverty policymakers at the international and national levels will give women’s leadership and decision-making a fresh look. The zero draft document prepared in advance of CSW 2024 as a starting point for deliberations addresses the feminization of poverty and the relationship between women’s leadership and poverty reduction head-on. In paragraph 16, for example, the draft observes that women’s assumption of a “disproportionate share of unpaid care and domestic work” is related to women’s economic participation and even their “entrepreneurial activities.” Ultimately, Claudia Goldin, the 2023 Nobel laureate for economics and first woman to win the prize solo, argues that women’s leadership in the marketplace is premised on structural changes to gender-unequal care-giving responsibilities.
Poverty is often the face of a woman. The hope is that this year’s CSW will help make women the face of the anti-poverty solutions.
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Rangita de Silva de Alwis is an expert member of the UN treaty body to the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Wharton.
Suggested Citation:
Rangita de Silva de Alwis, “Feminization of Poverty and Women’s Leadership,” in USALI Perspectives, 4, No. 8, February 22, 2024, https://usali.org/usali-perspectives-blog/feminization-of-poverty-and-womens-leadership.
The views expressed in USALI Perspectives essays are those of the authors, and do not represent those of USALI or NYU.
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