March 8, 2005
Latin America: At Least Half a Century Needed to Reach Goals
Inter Press Service

Although most countries of Latin America have made strides towards achieving gender equality, progress has been slow, and at this pace it will take at least 50 years to reach the targets agreed in 1995 at the Fourth U.N. World Conference on Women in Beijing.

María Cecilia Espinosa

SANTIAGO, Mar 8 (IPS) - Although most countries of Latin America have made strides towards achieving gender equality, progress has been slow, and at this pace it will take at least 50 years to reach the targets agreed in 1995 at the Fourth U.N. World Conference on Women in Beijing.

Civil society organisations in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela used an instrument called the Index of Fulfilled Commitments (Indice de Compromiso Cumplido or ICC) to gauge progress or setbacks in meeting the international gender equity and social justice goals from 1995 to 2003.

The ICC uses basic indicators to standardise the available statistics and oversee progress towards internationally agreed targets, independently of political parties and governments.

It was created by the Women's Initiative Group made up of Chilean women's organisations.

Ana María Muñoz, a researcher at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), told IPS that the ICC was used to measure progress towards the goals set "not only in 1995 but starting 20 years earlier, when the United Nations declared the decade of women, in 1975."

The Beijing accords are based on the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which was approved in 1979.

Goals like equal wages for men and women were established by International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 100 on Equal Remuneration, which has been almost universally ratified in Latin America since its creation in 1952.

The programme of action adopted at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994 set the goal of the full exercise of reproductive rights, through access to quality health services.

Muñoz said the results shown by the ICC are "good on average, but demonstrate that there is still a long way to go," and that at this pace "it will take 50 years before women reach adequate living standards in the region."

The ICC has monitored indicators on women's participation in and access to power, financial autonomy and poverty, health, and sexual and reproductive rights.

The ICC shows that the region has made steady progress, from 61 percent compliance with the goals in 1995 to 66 percent in 2003. The top spot in 2003 was occupied by Chile, with 75 percent fulfilment of the targets, followed by the Dominican Republic (72 percent) and Panama (68.9 percent).

But the country that made the greatest progress was El Salvador, whose compliance rate climbed from 58.4 to 68.2 percent in that eight-year period.

However, the improvement in the situation of women in Latin America has been uneven. While most countries have shown advances, countries like Mexico and Nicaragua have actually suffered setbacks, with fulfilment of health targets actually dropping 13 percentage points in Nicaragua in the period in question.

The lowest ICC average (just 24.4 percent) was seen in the area of participation and access to power, even though all of the countries in Latin America have formal policies aimed at achieving gender equality.

The problem, said Muñoz, is that "with the passage of time, these policies have seen their influence and share of the budget wane rather than increase."

The average proportion of female parliamentarians in the region stands at 15 percent, and the presence of women in high-level non-elected political posts is also limited.

The FLACSO study found that laws reserving quotas for women marked the difference between strong and poor results in that area, although in the countries that have quota laws, "they are used as a ceiling rather than as a starting-point."

Deputy María Antonieta Saa of the co-governing Party for Democracy (PPD) in Chile told IPS that since 1997, female parliamentarians have been unsuccessfully pushing for passage of a law that would establish quotas for women candidates while stipulating that no party could present more than 60 percent candidates of the same gender.

With respect to financial autonomy and poverty, the region advanced 4.4 percent from 1995 to 2003, to an average of 76.3 percent compliance.

Despite the growing proportion of women joining the labour market, equal remuneration has not yet been achieved, with compliance standing at 87 percent in the best of cases (El Salvador) and 57 percent in the worst (Guatemala).

With respect to literacy rates, with the exception of Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, more than 90 percent of young women in Latin America know how to read and write.

The setback with regard to health and sexual and reproductive rights, where compliance fell from 75.7 percent in 1995 to 73.6 percent in 2003, is due to cultural and religious barriers, and overall shortcomings in health services, especially in the area of reproductive health, according to the researchers.

Adriana Gómez, communications officer with the Chilean Health Network, a non-governmental organisation, told IPS that there are many "pending challenges" in the areas of sexual and reproductive health, particularly in terms of the right to abortion, and health care for adolescents.

"We introduced a bill for a framework law on sexual and reproductive rights, and in the past two years it has not even been taken up for debate in the legislature," she said.

In addition, "implementation of legislation on the rights of women has been slow and ineffective. Progress has been made at the level of rhetoric, laws and statutes, but in practice, the lives of women are still plagued by high levels of inequality," added Gómez. (END/2005)

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