Gender

In a world facing enormous challenges across regions - accelerating climate change, fundamentalisms, militarism, pervasive gender based violence, and rocketing macro-economic instability - the work of social justice movements has never been more important. But as these movements fight for justice, equality and positive social, political and economic transformation, how much attention is paid to the gender power relations within movements themselves? This short clip is from an interactive dialogue with leaders of organisations at the centre of economic justice movements, convened as part of the BRIDGE gender and social movements programme. The aims of the dialogue were to find out more about:

• How economic justice movements understand gender equality and women's economic rights
• How more productive alliances between women's movements and economic justice movements can be built
• What the entry points are for gender justice advocates who want to shape the work of economic justice movements

This short clip, featuring one of the speakers, Shalmali Guttal of Focus on the Global South, gives a taste of the interesting dialogue that took place.

A blog from IDS Knowledge Services' Gender Convenor Jenny Birchall discussing the event is available to read here.

We are far from easing the drudgery of women farm workers. But there is growing interest in designing technologies to improve their lives, report M Sreelata and Naomi Antony.

The seemingly simple act of removing the husks from maize cobs by hand is tougher than it sounds. A female worker uses her fingertips on average 522 times, her fingernails 144 times and her palms 55 times for every single kilogram of grain she produces, according to a survey carried out last year by India's Ministry of Agriculture.

Women — whether young or old, healthy or sick — can be found across the developing world working long hours without rest. They pick tea, process tobacco, shell cotton pods, spread fertilisers on fields and transplant rice.

In the developed world, this work is usually done by machines. But in poor countries, much of the labour is done by hand — and a woman's hand at that.

"It's shameful," says Anil Gupta, executive vice-chair of India's National Innovation Foundation (NIF).

"India can send up ten satellites in a single launch in different orbits. The science and technology capacity that we have is enormous. And yet when it comes to problems that women face, there's a huge silence, there is a huge indifference."

The meeting was organised by the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR), the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, and the Asia-Pacific Association of Agricultural Research Institutions.

More than 700 participants from 50 countries attended the meeting, which took place in the context of two reports on the role of women in agriculture — one in 2010 from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, and the other from the World Bank, released in 2011.

The UN report estimates that women contribute 47 per cent of global agricultural labour. But this international average is misleading. In many countries it is far higher; in Lesotho, Mozambique and Sierra Leone, for example, women carry more than 60 per cent of the agricultural workload. In Egypt women make up less than half of the agricultural workforce but account for 85 per cent of unpaid farm labour.

In his Budget speech, Minister of Finance Pravin Gordhan made specific reference to creating safer communities.  While we welcome the increases to the budget allocation, we await to see how the department of Police and Justice and Constitutional Development will spend it. With the technological revolution, we are fast becoming “online communities” and we are also seeing more crimes perpetrated using advanced technology. As  online spaces are also becoming unsafe (a reflection of what is happening in our society), especially for young girls and women, we need our police and justice system to respond to the challenges. Perpetrators of gender based violence are increasingly using technology to lure, track, monitor and stalk women and girls.

Justice Minister Jeff Radebe acknowledged on Wednesday that racial representivity on the Bench had made huge strides since 1994 but that he remained concerned about gender, pointing out that there was not a single female judge president in the country.

Amy Siskind, the president of The New Agenda says feminists in the United States remain silent when conservative women are attacked. 

Kathleen Mogelgaard a Senior Program Manager of the Population and Climate Change Program says "there is no quick fix to overcoming climate change's sexist tendencies".

The National Gender Machinery (NGM) met in Pretoria two months ago to discuss the possibility of establishing a Ministry for Women and Gender Affairs to advance the empowerment of women.

The Copperbelt provincial Gender Sub-Sommittee has called on departments to include gender activities in their annual departmental budgets. 

The United Kingdom (UK) government has published its proposals for new equality legislation however a law expert warns that the 'u-turn' could result in an "deluge of equal pay claims".