Societies gain by empowering women

Our vision is a world where girls and boys have equal opportunities for education, where mothers and children have equal access to better health care and medicines, where women and men share decision-making and household chores equally, equally enjoy fundamental human rights and strive equally to achieve peace, democracy, good governance and sustainable development for their families and nations.

Gender equality will only be achieved when men realise that they only have benefits to reap from it and when women realise that they need men for the female sex to achieve equality.

The National Council of Women (NCW) believes that a critical educational goal and outcome, alongside literacy and numeracy, should be the promotion of gender equality among boys and young men.

Accordingly, governments, international organisations, non-governmental organisations, the private sector, the media and other stakeholders should carry out critical reviews of school curricula, textbooks, television programmes and other educational materials at all levels to eliminate gender stereotypes and strengthen ways of promoting gender equality that engage boys, as well as girls.

In the workplace and labour market, these same actors should adopt and implement legislation and policies to close the pay gap between women and men. They should review national family law to ensure that it does not pose obstacles for men to play an active role in the lives of children and dependants. 

In the area of care-giving, they should develop campaigns that aim to remove stigma and cultural barriers that currently prevent certain groups of men and boys from caring for and supporting older, disabled and sick persons, in both the formal and the informal health sector.

Considering how much inequality still exists between women and men in most parts of the world, remarkable progress has however been achieved in a very short time. By empowering women politically, economically and socially, societies as a whole gain.

Men's role

Men and boys have an important role to promote gender equality and improved relations women, according to the NCW. Women cannot it achieve alone. Men must be fully integrated into the process. They must be encouraged to understand gender equality and its positive consequences.

Men's involvement is critical in reaching gender balance in a number of areas. Real change can come about only when stereotypical attitudes, which inhibit women's advancement and impede efforts to achieve gender equality, are removed once and for all.

Women are innovative when it comes to build bridges between conflicting parties. This has been proved time and again. They should be fully involved in efforts to promote and preserve peace, as well as to promote reconciliation and reconstruction in the aftermath of wars.

Although policies and strategies are in place in many entities and there has been an increased focus on the development of training, methodologies and tools, there remains a large gap between policy and practice.  Gender equality is not yet fully integrated into the work of even such large institutions as the United Nations.

Statistics

It is important for governments to publish statistics to show the real situation of men and women within our country. The NCW believes that statistics are an important tool to promote and lobby to change laws and policies. 

This explains why the NCW got involved, together with the NSO, in the recently issued study, which dealt with the obstacles to the participation of women in decision-making positions. Organisations such as our own have limited resources to collect data and publish statistics and it is only in collaboration with entities such as NSO that such data and analysis can be achieved.

Statistics help measure progress towards gender goals laid down in the Beijing Platform for Action, and to monitor whether gender-based policies and programmes are being effective. NCW also believes in the value that statistics have in improving the socio-economic situation of women, enhancing their participation in politics, and highlighting unequal resources between the sexes.

Ms Micallef is president, National Council of Women