This week during the 21st session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC), new CWP Executive Director Leilani Farha will speak to the importance of integrating a gender perspective when considering economic and social rights, and more specifically, the right to adequate housing. The panel is part of an annual gender analysis taken by the HRC to ensure that the Council is incorporating best practices in their policies and associated mechanisms.
While human rights hold their own strength, more consideration must be given to their role in protecting women considering the distinct challenges that women across the globe face. An excerpt from Canada Without Poverty’s recent Economic and Social Rights Online Course helps to explain this further:
“It is important to focus on women for several reasons. Women, comprising half of the population, have distinct socio-economic experiences as women. These experiences are based in a host of historical and contemporary social patterns, systems and structures that play themselves out in women’s every day lives, for example: patriarchy, the gendered division of labour, the phenomenon of male violence against women. As a result women – and particular groups of women –disproportionately experience poverty and economic inequality as compared to men. And because women have distinct socio-economic experiences, remedying violations of women’s rights requires distinct responses that take into consideration women’s particular socio-economic conditions.”
Equality is a critical right. However true equality will only be enjoyed if women’s particular economic and social conditions are understood and addressed. This means understanding the causes of women’s disadvantage and committing to remedying this disadvantage. Implementing substantive equality may require eliminating discriminatory policies or creating a new program to address the obstacles women face in order to reach equality, and it invariably requires positive action by governments.
In order for a disadvantaged group, like women, to experience rights protections equally, their particular context and needs must be at the centre of the analysis. Women’s equality in housing is not a matter of ensuring “superficial sameness”[1] but, rather, it is about the “accommodation of differences.”[2]
The recent Economic and Social Rights Online Course offers further insight:
“Women’s differential experiences of poverty, and other socio-economic disadvantage necessitates that laws and policies consider women’s particular circumstances if those laws and policies are going to ameliorate their disadvantage. Simply applying rights in a ‘gender neutral’ manner, that is, as though women and men were in the same position socially and economically, will not ensure that women get the same benefit from the rights that men do.”
At the HRC panel discussion Leilani will focus on the right to adequate housing as it relates to women. She has the honour of joining a distinguished group of individuals who will be discussing similar issues using a gender lens as it relates UN practices and systems on September 20th in Geneva. Panelists include, representatives from UN Women, the Portuguese Commission for Citizenship and the Deputy Chair of the South African Human Rights Commission and the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.
The purpose of the panel is to make recommendations to all UN Member States at the HRC on how gender integration within the Council can help achieve the goal of substantive equality for women. The session commences on 20 September 2012 at 12:00 pm Geneva time (6 hours ahead of EST).
*The video of the session can now be accessed online. To view Leilani’s presentation start the video at 24:41:
[1]. Gwen Brodsky and Shelagh Day, “Women’s Economic Inequality and the Canadian Human Rights Act,” in Women and the Canadian Human Rights Act: A Collection of Policy Research Reports (Ottawa: Status of Women Canada, 1999) 113 at 135.
[2]. Andrews v. Law Society of British Columbia, [1989] 1 S.C.R. 143. See discussion in Martha Jackman and Bruce Porter, “Women’s Substantive Equality and the Protection of Social and Economic Rights under the Canadian Human Rights Act,” in Women and the Canadian Human Rights Act, supra note 21, 43 at 56.
