Women's Rights

The scope of issues falling under the heading of the human rights of women has expanded greatly since the 1970s, with poverty and violence being two major areas that have been addressed.

Women and poverty.

According to the United Nations, of the world's 1.3 billion poor people, it is estimated that 70 percent are women. To blame is a complex web of factors including external debt, structural adjustment policies, and globalization. Ester Boserup's pivotal 1970 book Woman's Role in Economic Development first brought to light women's role in the process of development. Since then, the field has experienced a range of policy approaches (welfare, equity, antipoverty, efficiency, and empowerment), which reflect the changing debates on the topic and expanded participation of women from the Southern Hemisphere. Development has been a key issue in several international conferences and declarations and has been incorporated into the intersectoral work of several U.N. agencies.

In the late twentieth century, the topic evolved into discussions of gender and macroeconomics and women and poverty. Multiple actors, including governments, multilateral financial and development institutions, and national and international nongovernmental organizations and women's groups, have been urged to provide women economic opportunities, autonomy and resources, access to education and support services, and equal participation in decision-making processes. Despite several decades' worth of efforts to improve the lot of poor women, in the early years of the twenty-first century the gap between the world's rich and poor continued to expand unceasingly.

Violence against women.

Women and girls are often victims of violence because of their sex. Thanks in large part to the efforts of transnational networks, the topic of violence against women finally gained U.N. attention in the mid-1980s. It has since garnered enormous notice in a wide range of areas of concern including domestic violence, sexual assault and abuse, sexual harassment and trafficking in women, as well as prenatal sex selection in favor of male babies, female infanticide, female genital mutilation, forced prostitution, dowry-related violence, battering, and marital rape. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, there has been a surge in violence against women in situations of armed conflict, in particular murder, systematic rape, sexual slavery, and forced pregnancy.

The Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1993, and the Beijing Platform for Action are the most comprehensive international policy statements to address gender-based violence. The U.N. General Assembly established at UNIFEM the Trust Fund in Support of Actions to Eliminate Violence against Women with the aim of identifying and supporting inventive projects to prevent and eliminate gender-based violence. Among other suggestions, governments and other national bodies are urged to enact and enforce legislation against the perpetrators of practices and acts of violence against women, to promote the modification of social and cultural patterns that condone violence, and to ameliorate institutional mechanisms for the reporting of violence. With increased attention to the issue, violence against women is bound to appear to get worse before it improves due to an increase in the reporting of violence and an ever expanding number of acts subsumed in the definition of violence.

Women have long strived to expand modern notions of human rights to move beyond Western, liberal conceptions based on the rights of man meaning males. Those from the South in particular have struggled to ensure that the human rights of women take into consideration their unique needs and concerns. With the help of national governments and national and international organizations, including human rights and women's rights networks, the U.N. system has become instrumental in identifying and addressing the human rights of women as being unique from those of men. Though progress has been achieved, much work remains for the full realization of equality between the sexes.