Economic Justice and Rights
Addressing women's burden of unpaid care and inequalities in the health and care workforce to advance gender equality.
Evidence shows that women’s economic justice and rights are foundational to improving health and wellbeing, combatting poverty, and creating a more gender-equal and sustainable world. Women Deliver focuses on addressing girls’ and women’s disproportionate burden of unpaid care work and gender inequality in the health and care workforce.
Overview
Women Deliver promotes, makes the investment case for, and advances the most critical and impactful policy interventions that recognize, reduce, and redistribute women’s unpaid and underpaid care burden, including through championing 1) decent work policies, 2) universal social protections, and 3) a reversal of harmful gender norms.
Women Deliver’s 2021-2025 Strategic Framework addresses the crucial linkages between key gender equality issue areas and the care economy, including:
- Advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), which is essential to empowering girls and women economically.
- Addressing the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the care economy and health and care workforce.
- Addressing the impact of climate change on girls’ and women’s access to work and burden of care work at home.
Women Deliver's Engagement
Women Deliver engages in high-impact global advocacy work around women’s economic justice and rights during key policy windows across four levers to drive change.
We are driving investments and policy change by:
- Co-leading of the Alliance for Gender Equality and Universal Health Coverage (UHC), which we co-founded in 2019. We are working closely with Alliance partners to address inequality in the health workforce, including in the design of UHC implementation plans. In 2019, the Alliance pushed for the inclusion of policy recommendations on the rights of women in the health workforce, which are reflected in the UN Political Declaration on Universal Health Coverage.
- Leveraging our Official Relations Status with the WHO to ensure that a gender equality lens is incorporated into the WHO’s technical guidance and frameworks. Women Deliver provided key inputs on the rights of health care workers to the WHO’s Working for Health 2022-2030 Action Plan, including on recognizing and remunerating women who perform underpaid and unpaid healthcare work, occupational segregation and equal pay for equal work, and on the need to use an intersectional approach when collecting and analyzing data.
We are strengthening capacity and knowledge sharing by:
- Holding events with Global Alliance for Care members, including “The Relevance of Care Work for Gender Equality – Action for Sustainability,” an event held with the Governments of Argentina, Germany, and Mexico (INMUJERES) during the Sixty-sixth session of the Commission of the Status of Women (CSW66). The event featured a multi-stakeholder and intergenerational discussion on how the Alliance plays a catalytic role in promoting the incorporation of care dimensions in social, labor, environmental, and economic policies, in order to bring transformative change for gender equality. The discussion highlighted the relevance of sustainable care systems to tackle climate change and to build more resilient societies, providing a unique opportunity to mobilize multi-stakeholder engagement and promote investment at scale for care systems and care system solutions.
We are connecting for collective action by:
- Engaging in the Global Alliance for Care and the Gender Equal Health and Care Workforce Initiative, including as part of our broader commitment to the Generation Equality Forum. Through the Global Alliance for Care, Women Deliver shares best practices with governments, international organizations, the private sector, academia, youth, and civil society. As part of the Gender Equal Health and Care Workforce Initiative, Women Deliver advocates for gender equality to be reflected in healthcare workforce initiatives.
We are building and using the evidence and investment case by:
- Generating new research, including a first-of-its-kind international survey “Citizens Call for a Gender-Equal World: A Roadmap for Action,” which found that the global public believes that the unequal distribution of unpaid care work and domestic responsibilities between women and men is one of the greatest barriers to gender equality around the world. This research, carried out in partnership with Focus 2030, provided the evidence needed to spur bigger and bolder commitments to advancing economic justice and rights at the landmark Generation Equality Forum.
- In partnership with the Population Council, we published "Having a Child Before Becoming an Adult: Exploring the Economic Impact in a Multi-Country Analysis". The study is one of the first multi-country analyses to examine the short- and long-term impacts of having a child before age 18 on employment and monetary compensation. This report underscores the need to develop policies and programs that support employment opportunities that are economically empowering to girls and women, including social protection systems that recognize and value unpaid care work.
