Women, Power, and Poverty: How the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women Can Help
By Meghan Campbell
The lives of countless numbers of women and girls are marked by economic hardship. There is something about being a woman that both causes and perpetuates women’s poverty. Their role in reproduction; their almost sole responsibility for caregiving; women’s limited access to sexual and reproductive health services, educational opportunities, property, and forms of credit; deeply entrenched socio-cultural attitudes on the role and value of girls and women; the segregation of women into low-paid and precarious work; and the exclusion of women from public life creates a unique experience for women in poverty. Traditional definitions of poverty have centered around economic want or deprivation. For women, however, this definition is inadequate. Poverty for women also includes, inter alia exclusion from social life, political marginalization, bodily and psychological insecurity, stigma, fatigue, and voicelessness and these traditional hallmarks of poverty are inherently bound up for women within gender power relations. Women’s poverty does not merely consist of the redistribution wrongs of not having access to economic resources but is inherently connected to socio-cultural gender norms, structures, and power relations that devalue and exclude women.
The role of law in redressing women’s poverty is contentious, particularly at the domestic level. Although the human rights of women in poverty are routinely violated and denied, domestic courts, for a myriad of reasons often revolving around institutional competency and legitimacy, are often hesitant to redress economic inequalities. The international plane holds more promise for grappling with women’s poverty as the United Nations, across its various political platforms especially via the UN Human Rights Council Special Mandate Holders, investigates and seeks to remedy both women’s inequality and poverty. But there is still much to be done to fully address the relationship between women and poverty. The next step is to situate the relationship between women and poverty in binding international legal commitments. Socio-economic rights—the right to food, water, housing, or social security—are commonly understood to be the strongest tool to redress women’s poverty. Seemingly the first choice then for situating gender-based poverty in the international human rights treaties would be the UN International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which protects key socio-economic rights. However, the specific role of gender in perpetuating women’s poverty points towards using new legal tools, specifically the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).
CEDAW is the definitive legal instrument for women’s equality and human rights. If a state signs and ratifies treaties CEDAW creates binding obligations on the international plane, although akin to all UN human rights treaties, it has weak enforcement mechanisms. It was drafted in response to the failure of mainstream human rights treaties, ICESCR and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to take women’s rights seriously. The primary objective of CEDAW is to eliminate discrimination and achieve equality so that women can fully enjoy their human rights. It is a sophisticated legal instrument that protects women’s civil, political, and socio-economic rights, and unlike many other human rights instruments, CEDAW also requires states to modify negative gendered socio-cultural patterns and prejudices. Although CEDAW is committed to the empowerment of women, it contains no explicit obligation for states to remedy women’s poverty. Notwithstanding this silence, it still holds significant promise. The rights in CEDAW are immediate and, unlike socio-economic rights in ICESCR, are not subject to progressive realization. The breadth of CEDAW means that the CEDAW Committee, the body that monitors the implementation of CEDAW, well placed to address how poverty acts as an obstacle to civil, political, and socio-economic rights. Perhaps most importantly, CEDAW has a detailed understanding of the role of gender in the realization of rights.
The lack of specific obligations on poverty in CEDAW can be addressed through an evolutionary interpretation of equality and non-discrimination that takes account of emerging understandings on the relationship between human rights and poverty. There are no free-standing rights to equality and non-discrimination in CEDAW, but rather states are required to eliminate discrimination and secure women’s equality in broad areas of life such as education, employment, and political life. Equality and non-discrimination are central and intertwined concepts that together form the core of the state’s obligation. Article 1 prohibits any sex- or gender-based distinctions that impair or nullify women’s enjoyment or exercise of their human rights on the basis of equality. Although the text does not define equality, the CEDAW Committee, the body that monitors the implementation of CEDAW, holds that states must not only guarantee women formal and de jure equality, but also de facto and substantive equality. The CEDAW Committee holds that under CEDAW, the state is required to ensure a “real transformation of opportunities, institutions and systems so they are no longer grounded in historically determined male paradigms of power and life patterns.” Equality and non-discrimination are not static but evolve over time. As new understandings emerge on how gendered stereotypes, relations, and structures are connected to the realization of women’s rights, the As the CEDAW Committee explains, these norms are meant to anticipate “the emergence of new forms of discrimination that had not been identified at the time of drafting.” Poverty acts as an obstacle to women’s rights, thus the concepts of equality and non-discrimination in CEDAW can, and must, account for the connection between gender and economic deprivation.
A few examples help illustrate the strengths of an equality-based approach to women’s poverty.
In comparison with men, women shoulder a disproportionate amount of caring responsibilities for children. Criteria to access welfare benefits, such as performing a certain number of paid hours in the formal labor market, can no longer be structured upon a male model of an autonomous individual divorced from caring relationships but must account for the impact of women’s caring roles. To achieve women’s equality in economic and social life under Article 13 of CEDAW, poverty alleviation schemes must be structured so as to set women up to fail. Other forms of welfare criteria may perpetuate negative stereotypes that women in poverty are lazy, promiscuous, or unfit mothers. An equality-based approach to welfare benefits does not blame, shame, or degrade women. This same type of analysis can be brought to bear on the other substantive obligations in CEDAW, such as the exclusion of low-paid domestic workers from labour laws or ensuring affordable access to digital technologies so women in poverty can participate in online political activism and are not excluded from employment opportunities.
The CEDAW Committee is consistently bringing to states' attention how poverty undermines women’s equality in the treaty’s accountability mechanisms. It is hoped that the CEDAW Committee will take the next step and bring together these insights a General Recommendation on women and poverty. This would be a definitive statement that could act as a focal point for transformative change, sparking discussions on human rights approaches to women’s poverty by domestic and international policymakers, civil society organizations, and grassroots movements. These actors can work together to develop best practices on using human rights to ensure that women in poverty can develop, advance, participate, and enjoy a meaningful life.
Meghan Campbell is Reader in International Human Rights Law at the University of Birmingham. Her research explores how the international human rights system can best respond to gender inequality and poverty. Her monograph Women, Poverty, Equality (Hart Publishing, 2018) explores how the concept of equality in the UN Convention on the Discrimination on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women can be interpreted to address gender-based poverty. She has published peer-reviewed articles on gender equality, human rights, international legal system and public law. She is Deputy Director of the Oxford Human Rights Hub and founder and Managing Editor of the University of Oxford Human Rights Hub Journal.
Photo is Dante Baseana and is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
