Back | Programme Area: Gender and Development (2000 - 2009), Special Events (2000 - 2009) | Event: Ford Foundation Launch - UNRISD Report on Gender Equality: Striving for Justice in an Unequal World
Ford Foundation Launch - UNRISD Report on Gender Equality: Striving for Justice in an Unequal World
- Date: 7 Mar 2005
- Location: Auditorium, Ford Foundation Building,
320 E. 43rd St., New York, USA
- Speakers: Amina Mama, Diane Elson, Anne Marie Goetz, Pregs Govender, Amrita Basu, Deniz Kandiyoti, Ching Kwan Lee, Frances Lund, Thandika Mkandawire , Shahra Razavi, Stephanie Seguino, Onalenna Doo Selolwane, Rosalba Todaro
- Project Title: Policy Report on Gender and Development: 10 Years after Beijing
Speech by Anne Marie Goetz
From Anne Marie Goetz's speech...
"There isn’t anything that I am going to say that Pregs Govender did not already say or imply about gender and the challenges of advancing women’s rights through politics. I am going to go over the same type of territory but in a much more prosaic and definitely less moving way. Before I start I would like to stress that the part of the report that I am discussing- the part on politics, policy making and governance, is the product of many different people and some of them are here today on our panel, Amrita Basu and Onalenna Selolwane wrote background papers. There is a least three people here that also wrote background papers, Virgina Bouvier on the Latin American women’s movement, Du Jie on China and women’s politics in China and Fatou Sow on West Africa women’s movements.
What is all this about- women in politics and policy making? Really in the end what we are after is governance for gender equity. Gender equality has always raised governance concerns understood as a whole range of issues around the state’s capacity to defend women rights and equality in gender relations. And as we know states have rarely met the targets that they set themselves in signing international agreements or on agreeing to protect women’s rights. There are all kinds of reasons for this. They have to do with state-gendered capacity failures, gendered capacity failures in state institutions which we hear graphically in the presentation of Chin Kwan Lee about China, where the state has perfect legislation but it is unable, has not got the capacity to implement it. In many more cases male biases are institutionalised in formal legislation and laws. So gender equitable governance raises a whole pile of concerns that are related to current good governance agendas; getting rid of corruption, dealing with bureaucratic ineptness and incompetence and inadequacies, dealing with economic mismanagement but from a gender sensitive perspective and the report deals with this."