Unlocking Women’s Potential by Ending Discriminatory Laws

The UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) has just reaffirmed that gender equality is the “fundamental prerequisite for sustainable development.” When women’s rights are respected and protected, people thrive. But when the principles of equality are violated, countries decline. So it is vital for governments around the world to tackle the many sex-discriminatory laws that hinder female economic participation and prevent the realisation of women’s rights.

Twenty years after the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, it’s high time to take action. This year’s CSW meeting is an ideal platform to send a clear message to governments: unlock the potential of women by investing in legal equality. Women should not be constrained in the labour market, nor left behind to manage homes and families – and this can only be achieved by ending the discriminatory laws that restrict women’s access to jobs, equal pay, property ownership and inheritance.

Women’s rights activists have made huge strides over the past seven generations, but it is easy for those who have only known this recent period of change to forget that this was not always the case. Some of the things that feminists have fought for seemed almost outlandish at their inception: sending girls to school instead of staying at home to cook and clean, working outside the home for pay, voting in national elections, playing sports for a living, and so on.

In North America in the 1850s, women who could read and write questioned their traditional role as wives, mothers and housewives, and they organised to fight for their rights. They met at the Seneca Falls Convention to discuss their concerns, and hoped for a series of women’s rights conventions to be held nationwide.

The women’s rights movement spread throughout Europe after the Second World War, with activists collecting signatures calling for working women to be paid the same as men and for them to be able to divorce their husbands and live independently. And it spread to Africa, with countries like Gabon reforming their laws to allow women to work without permission from their husbands and to own property.

Today, women’s groups around the world are still organising to fight for their rights. In the developed world, women are now better represented in government and the workforce compared to earlier generations, but they are still not fully reflected in decision-making bodies. And there are still major gaps to close – in education, violence against women, political participation and economic empowerment.

These gaps are driven by patriarchal attitudes and standards that systematically disadvantage women, and they can be broken down only through sustained effort and collective action. Medica mondiale supports the efforts of these groups, and calls on governments and businesses to support them by changing laws and policies that discriminate against women, and by supporting their work to remove barriers in society that lead to gender-based inequality. This is the only way to achieve true equality, and build a better future for everyone.