Modern Families: An Interview with UN Women on Progress of the World’s Women 2019–2020: Families in a Changing World

Ginette Azcona is a Research and Data Policy Specialist at UN Women and currently leads the data and statistics work for UN Women’s flagship reports, including UN Women’s Progress of the World’s Women, Survey on the Role of Women in Development, and the 2018 SDG report Turning Promises into Action. She joined UN Women in 2010. Before this, she was part of the research and writing team for the United Nations Development Programme’s 2009 Human Development Report, Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development. Azcona has authored numerous publications on human development, human rights, social justice and gender and development data. She holds a master’s degree in international relations from the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University and a master’s degree in public administration from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.

Antra Bhatt is a Statistics Specialist at UN Women. She has been a key contributor to the statistical analysis for UN Women’s latest flagship reports, including Progress of the World’s Women (2019) and Turning Promises into Action (2018). Before joining UN Women in 2017, Bhatt worked as a researcher on women’s economic and social empowerment at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, India, and at the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations in Rome. She holds a Ph.D. in development economics from the Tor Vergata University of Rome in Italy and a master’s degree in public policy from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.

Since 2016, the 193 countries in the  United Nations General Assembly have been working toward implementing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Goal 5 is to “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.” The UN Women report Progress of the World’s Women 2019–2020: Families in a Changing World, released in June 2019, provides a national, regional, and global overview of the strides made toward this target of gender parity and an assessment of the ways in which gender-based inequities persist and evolve through the lens of the family, one of the central institutions of human life. (Azcona and Bhatt provided joint responses for the interview below.) 

 

Chicago Policy Review: What is the main motivation behind this report? Could you briefly describe the Sustainable Development Goals and how this report relates to that agenda?

Azcona and Bhatt: Our motivation for this and previous editions of the report is to spur action on key areas affecting women’s rights and gender equality. In our latest report we center the role families play in advancing women’s rights, within the home and outside it. We make use of previously unreleased analyses on household structures and living arrangements to better understand how families look today, with the view of understanding how laws and policies can be better informed to advance gender equality in the context of a changing world.

Ensuring that families are places of equality and are free from discrimination is essential for the achievement of the SDGs. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Goals are a promise to deliver a better world — a world where poverty and hunger in all their forms and dimensions are eradicated, where our planet is healed and protected, where gender equality is achieved and where all human beings can enjoy safe and prosperous lives. With this report, UN Women calls on governments, civil society, and the private sector to recognize the rich diversity of families, recognize the role they place in women’s access to rights and opportunities, and work together to ensure that families in all their diversity, and women and girls within them, flourish.

Families are a critical part of the landscape that defines our world and our place in it. Achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls (SDG 5), for example, demands the elimination of violence, including family-based violence, and an end to harmful practices. It requires women having access to economic resources, including through equal inheritance rights and equality in family laws, and promoting shared responsibility for the provision of unpaid care and domestic work, which too often falls disproportionately on women’s shoulders.

CPR: What are the key messages of this report?

Azcona and Bhatt: One of the key takeaways from the report is that families are diverse and changing. Families around the world look, feel, and live differently today. Global data used in the report shows that only 38 percent of households are couples living with their children (of any age). Extended families, which include other relatives, are also common, at 27 percent. Lone-parent families are 8 percent of households. This translates to 101.3 million households where lone mothers live alone with their children. The vast majority (84 percent of lone-parent households) are maintained by women, often juggling paid work, child rearing, and care of other dependents. To advance gender equality, laws and policies need to be based on the reality of how families live, including greater attention to the needs of lone mothers living alone or in extended households.

In the report, we also point out major demographic and social changes that are transforming women’s family lives. Age of marriage has increased in all regions. While marriage remains universal, women are increasingly delaying marriage or choosing to cohabit before or instead of getting married. Progress in gender equality and women’s empowerment — as reflected in the gains in girls’ educational attainment, female labor force participation, and access to healthcare, and in the reductions in infant and child mortality — are key drivers of these broad demographic shifts. In other areas, progress is less evident. Women’s physical safety and economic security in families are frequently not guaranteed. In 2017, an estimated 58 percent of female victims of murder were killed by a member of their own family, amounting to 137 women every day.

A core message of the report is that families can be “make or break” for women and girls when it comes to achieving their rights. They can be spaces where women receive love, care, and fulfillment, but often they can also be spaces where women and girls experience violence. The report emphasizes that recognizing the diversity of families is essential for designing appropriate laws and policies, which need to be based on the reality of how families live today.

CPR: In particular, the report describes the changing and diverse nature of families. How should these variations inform policymakers’ actions and decisions?

Azcona and Bhatt: Let’s take the example of diversity of partnership arrangements. As described in the report, in regions where cohabitation has become much more commonplace, cohabiting partners still do not always have the same rights as married couples when it comes to social protection, inheritance, custody, and maintenance. Levelling up to this standard should be a priority for all countries. As of May 2019, 42 countries and territories have extended the right to marry or partnership recognition to same-sex couples. Such relationship recognition is essential for extending other rights to same-sex partners, including the right to adopt children and the right to family reunification in the context of migration.

CPR: The report mentions that “care-giving remains strongly feminized.” Does this seem likely to change in the near future?

Azcona and Bhatt: While women’s access to economic resources has improved overall, the distribution of unpaid care work remains very unequal.Compared to men, women do three times the amount of unpaid care and domestic work within families, with particularly stark inequalities in the context of developing countries, where access to time-saving infrastructure and public services are often limited.

In many regions, the needs and demands for care of children and older persons are not matched by the existing supply of institutionalized care services. When professional care is unavailable or unaffordable, women and girls are expected to fill the gap, which either reduces their time for schooling, paid work, and rest, or results in care needs being neglected. This dynamic has negative consequences for women’s ability to access decent paid work, as well as for their own mental and physical health.

The report calls for this situation to change and for a more equitable sharing of workload within the household, while encouraging governments to invest in care services and essential infrastructure. With enough political will and policy focus, target 5.4.1 of the SDGs — which is to “recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and the family as nationally appropriate” — can be achieved.

CPR: The report includes a section on “What will it cost to support gender equality and women’s empowerment?” Could you walk us through this? What is likely to be the most affordable aspect of the proposed family policies, and how can policymakers reduce or cope with these costs?

Azcona and Bhatt: The cost analysis commissioned for this report shows that financing a package of family-friendly policies that would advance women’s rights is in fact affordable for most countries, in terms of the share of gross domestic product (GDP) that they would need to allocate. The package would include income protection over the lifecycle, including for children, unemployed working-age individuals, and older persons, and also emphasizes social protection, health, and care services as vital investments for women, families, and societies. In concrete terms, the package is centered on building children’s capabilities, safeguarding the dignity and human rights of people with disabilities and older persons, and creating decent employment opportunities for women and men in the care sector.

Based on the study, a quarter of countries (41 out of 155 studied) could implement the family-friendly package for less than 3 percent of GDP, and just over half (79 countries) could do so for less than 5 percent of GDP. For one-fifth of countries (35 countries) included in the study, these policies would cost more than 10 percent of GDP, which would require additional external support to achieve, including Official Development Assistance (ODA).

As this report has argued, investing in a package of family-friendly policies is imperative for progress on women’s rights and to support families. To implement this family-friendly package, governments need to take action and mobilize resources in a range of ways, including by increasing tax revenues, expanding social security coverage, borrowing or restructuring debt, and leveraging aid and transfers, as well as curtailing South-North transfers and eliminating illicit financial flows. This is in line with global commitments already made, including the Addis Ababa Action Agenda of the Third International Conference on Financing for Development, which reiterated the importance of “further strengthening the mobilization and effective use of domestic resources.”

CPR: Do you have any advice for students who are interested in careers in this space (the overlap between gender and development)?

Azcona and Bhatt: Integrate gender and development discourse in your day-to-day lives. Talk about gender equality, question gendered roles in your own relations with others, empower others to speak up, listen and learn from them, and fight gender-based discrimination and stereotypes, including your own. Gender advocates are often the minority voice; we need to change that, and the change starts with a conversation. Our career advice for students interested in this space is to work towards gaining as much practical exposure as possible to real life projects. Getting out there in the field can help put classroom-based learning in perspective and better prepare you for post-student life.

Featured photo: cc/(Bhupi, photo ID: 1049346704, from iStock by Getty Images)