CSW65 and Covid-19: It's Time to Have Women at the Table

On the eve of the 65th Commission on the Status of Women meeting at the United Nations, which this year will take place virtually, Barbara van Paassen reflects on COVID-19, what we can learn from civil society organisations working for gender equity, and the urgent need to put women at the global tables where potentially transformative decisions are made.

It was International Women’s Day, 8 March 2018, when I arrived in New York as a member of the Netherlands’ delegation to the annual meeting of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). We had two days to prepare with women’s groups and civil society organisations ahead of this important annual moment for governments to take stock of their progress on gender equality and agree on action to advance women’s and girls’ rights. As the first-ever NGO representative to join the Dutch government team, I had a unique opportunity to help make change; to participate in the negotiations and – most importantly – ensure that civil society perspectives would be taken into account. It was a role I did not take lightly, knowing the longstanding concerns of civil society groups on lack of inclusion, and in solidarity with the thousands of women’s rights advocates who had also travelled to New York.

Three years on, the CSW’s 65th session will look totally different. In this virtual event, there will be no long lines for registration, no long nights in the negotiation room, and no representatives of civil society organisations gathering in the hallways of the United Nations Headquarters in a bid to remind the world’s governments what is at stake. No early arrivals that allow CSW participants to get to know each other, sharing our experiences from rural Kenya, Manila or The Hague; no chance encounters, unexpected insights, or opportunities to strategise together. In a time of shrinking civic space, it is striking that this year’s priority theme is “Women's full and effective participation and decision-making in public life, as well as the elimination of violence, for achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls”. (It is also striking how CSW always come up with incredibly long titles).

The importance of this theme has been well laid out by the UN’s own expert panel, with the December 2020 Report of the Secretary General emphasising that “Gender equality cannot be achieved unless public life and decision-making includes women and girls in all their diversity.” Perhaps even more importantly, the widespread failure to achieve this aim means that “policy outcomes are likely to be harmful and ineffective and to lead to the violation of women’s rights”.

This is exactly what was shown in recent work I did for the Women 2030 Global Shadow Report, where I looked at opportunities and structural barriers for achieving gender equality, drawing on the work of feminist and environmental organisations in 34 countries. And in “The gendered impacts of large-scale land investments and women’s responses”, Magdalena Kropiwnicka and I identified key lessons on safeguarding women’s rights in the face of investments to support the work of Trocaire and other CSOs.

Both reports highlight that the exclusion of women from decision-making – whether in large-scale land investments or policy development – goes hand in hand with the material loss of land and livelihoods, higher levels of violence, physical and mental health challenges and women’s further disempowerment. On the other hand, we found many examples around the world of women leading change that benefits not only themselves, but their societies and the planet.

In the time of COVID-19, where are the women?

Times of crisis offer both opportunities and risks for those who are most marginalised. Many people have expressed hope that the pandemic, although it has taken an incredible toll on lives, liberties and livelihoods, could also be a critical juncture for transformative change. So what has been happening to women’s participation in the past year, and what can it tell us about what can be done at this unique moment in time?

Unfortunately, we have little data to go on but a few trends emerge. The pandemic has made participation in public and decision-making spaces difficult for most people, but for women and other groups that have long been excluded, it has been especially challenging. In the absence of physical meeting spaces, access to technology and internet becomes even more important, and around the world, the digital divide has become even more pronounced – and in very gendered ways. For example, in India, despite the country’s burgeoning tech industry, many families have only one phone, which is typically controlled by the male head of the household. While in theory virtual meeting spaces can allow women from rural and remote areas to participate more easily, women’s organisations participating in the Emergent Agency project being undertaken by Oxfam and Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity report that the opposite is often true.

We know that the obstacles that women already faced have only increased during the coronavirus crisis: the burden of unpaid care work, the precarity of paid labour, and the ubiquity of threats and violence at home and elsewhere, including online. We know that girls, women and gender-diverse people of colour, with migrant status or otherwise facing intersecting discriminations, are particularly exposed. All these factors have affected the ability of women to discuss and organise by coming together, which we know is a crucial prerequisite for meaningful participation.

We have also seen that the majority of government and other official COVID-19 response teams have been male-led and male-dominated, and their policies and actions have frequently overlooked the needs of women. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the executive director of UN Women, recently called on the world’s governments to stop sidelining women in their pandemic responses. “Of 87 countries that we surveyed, only 3.5 per cent have task forces with 50 per cent women,” she said. “The rest of the countries have task forces in which women are a minority… this is unacceptable.”

Meanwhile, “manels” – all-male “expert” panels – remain ubiquitous in coronatime, and surveys by civil society organisations, such as Care’s recent report “Where Are the Women?”, show that “Local women’s rights and women-led organizations and leaders are not being included in decision making around the humanitarian response, or receiving their fair share of funding.” In contexts such as these, it is hardly surprising that we are not seeing the gender-sensitive COVID-19 responses that women’s groups and movements have been calling for – let alone truly transformative ones.

At the same time, we know that women around the world are on the pandemic frontlines, supporting their families and communities. As a recent ActionAid report detailed, organisations that promote women-led localised emergency responses are particularly good at addressing the needs of all those affected, while at the same time strengthening skills and transforming gender relations. It has also been widely observed that coronavirus responses in many of the countries led by women have highly effective, and more likely to have taken women’s particular needs into account.

If you want to include more women, learn from women how to do so

It’s a no-brainer that debates and decision-making that exclude half of the population – or any part of it, for that matter – are not only unjust, but also result in half-baked solutions. Indeed, few people would argue the point – and yet, on the eve of CSW65, we are still very far from having enough women at the table. Luckily, we know much of what needs to be done to include all women in informing, shaping – and taking – key decisions, and feminist groups and women’s rights organisations around the world have been showing the way.

For starters, we need better data on gender equality in all spheres of life, and we need women involved in that effort. The fact that we simply don’t know what is currently happening to women’s participation in decision-making is especially concerning. In both studies I did, we found that lack of gender-differentiated intersectional data and women’s voices in research were major obstacles for achieving gender equality. But we also know that when women are included in design, data gathering and analysis, research can be truly transformational.

The main challenge is making participation and decision-making truly full and meaningful for women in all their diversity. Both studies showed that exclusion from policy processes is particularly pronounced for women from rural areas, indigenous or migrant backgrounds; encouragingingly, however, many civil society organisations and movements have become increasingly successful in including and supporting these groups. Access to information and safe spaces for women to share their experiences, to do joint (power) analysis and to organise themselves, are really important enablers. This also means that we must be intentional about language, (digital) security, timings of meetings that work for women and their particular roles – e.g. as caregivers or farmers – and other practical barriers women face, as well as ensuring their visibility (hence the need to end manels). There is a wealth of evidence to show that if we want to make sure women can truly participate meaningfully, engaging men in challenging deep-rooted social stereotypes and adopting quotas are both key.

How to be in the room – when you can’t be in the room

While the insights, lived experience and determination of women’s movements and organisations around the world give cause for hope, it is also true that many groups and individuals are at increasing risk from growing repression, lack of funding and the additional challenges presented by the pandemic. Without having a physical presence in decision-making spaces, or even just in the corridors and hallways that lead to the tables where decision-makers sit, women’s groups, now more than ever, need support from allies across the globe and opportunities to have meaningful online participation.

Civil society organisations are actively calling for this support. A recent letter from 70+ women’s organisations to the chair of the CSW65 negotiations has emphasised the opportunity it presents to reverse course by developing new best practices to place feminist and gender justice organisations at the centre of the collective work. For a look at how this could happen, last year’s “open call for strong and inclusive civil society engagement at UN virtual forums” made by 350 organisations has some valuable and timely suggestions. I also hope that many more women and girls will have the opportunity to be part of the actual negotiations, as I saw first-hand what a difference it can make.

As we look to the post-COVID-19 future – for people of all genders, age and colour – the stakes are high. So far, despite our hopes for using the pandemic’s “critical juncture” to achieve more transformative change, it has failed to materialise. Instead, the very power structures and patriarchy that characterise most of our societies have persisted, if not intensified, over the past year. CSW65 will be an important opportunity to move beyond rhetoric and finally show the placing of “women at the table” to be the game-changer we know it can be.

We need to start, then with the “full and effective participation of women in all their diversity” within these very negotiations, so that they can share and discuss the solutions and alternatives that have been working for them. It is our very best bet for real and lasting change.

Read the full reports referenced in this article:

Women 2030 Global Shadow report: Gender equality on the ground. Feminist findings and recommendations for achieving Agenda 2030 (June 2020), by Barbara van Paassen for Women 2030. Commissioned by Women Engage for a Common Future and Women2030 partners.

The gendered impacts of large scale land investments and women’s responses (May 2020), by Magdalena Kropniwicka and Barbara van Paassen. Commissioned by Trocaire.

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme, the International Inequalities Institute, or the London School of Economics and Political Science.