Gender Priorities for the Twenty-First Century

It is a matter of grave concern to all women of the world that after three UN conferences on women and two years short of the two decades of UN system-wide efforts to integrate women into development, and to take all appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination against women and to ensure them equal rights with men, for the majority of the world’s women the Nairobi statistics are still the reality. Women, though one-half of the world’s population, still do two-thirds of its work, earn one-tenth of its income and own one-hundredth of its property. World-wide, one out of every three households is run by a woman. World-wide, one out of every three women work for pay, earning 73 cents to a man’s dollar, often in insecure, futureless, health-eroding jobs no man would take. She may work up to 80 hours a week, much of her work unpaid or even unacknowledged. When she falls ill — and in the developing world she often does, due to repeated pregnancy, hard manual labour and undernutrition — two times out of three she will not find a trained health worker to attend her, if the cost of health care, family priorities and cultural practices even allow her to search for one.