Research

This report covers progress made by Gender Links as the lead agency for the policy arm of the Media Action Plan on HIV/AIDS and Gender. It begins with a general overview followed by country reports. Attached at Annex A is a list of the country facilitators for the MAP policy roll out and their contact information. Attached at Annex B is a composite plan for the roll out in each country for 2007/2008, showing how facilitators plan to complete work started as well as approach new media houses to achieve the MAP target of eighty percent of all media houses in the region having HIV and AIDS and Gender policies by the end of 2008.

The ICT arena is characterized by the strategic control exercised by powerful corporations and nations - monopolies built upon the intellectual property regime, increasing surveillance of the Interned and an undermining of its democratic substance, and exploitation of the powerless by capitalist imperialism, sexism and racism.  Within the ICT arena women have relatively little ownership of and influence on the decision-making processes being underrepresented in the private sector and government bodies which control this arena.

Statistics around the way women are portrayed in the media reflect a dismal story.  In 1995 women made up 17% of news subjects, five years later the Global Media Monitoring Project 200, which involved teams collecting data across the world, revealed that this figure increased to only 18%.  This was despite considerable intervention, including the adoption of the Beijing Platform of Action.

Women's labour supply is very inelastic, and additional labour burdens on women are likely to be detrimental to the well-being of others in household. Thus increased NTAE production, in the absence of additional inputs, must come from crop switching or an increase in men's labour. The field research found some indication that the gender division of labour is less rigid than is often believed, and that men are prepared to participate more fully in all aspects of agricultural production if the incentives to do so are adequate. But will this imply that men will "take over" women's crops to the detriment of women's position in the household? This remains an open question. Indeed, there is also some indication that women do not welcome the loss of autonomy resulting from more co-operative household production systems.

The purpose of this initiative is to assist with the development of a database, containing ICT SMMEs owned by black or women as well as to recommend Black and Women ICT SMME support programs, which will address skills and enterprise development within SMMEs.  It may be expected that such ICT SMME support programs will ultimately increase employment and competitiveness in South Africa through the provision of more employable ICT workers.

The ICT industry is losing the talent of skilled women who can bring to it a richness and diversity of thought and perspective and can help alleviate the shortage of skills, which is exacerbated by their lack of participation.  Without women as an integral part of the workforce, the ICT industry is bereft of many potential contributors to the formulation of government and research policy and the development of technology that benefits communities as a whole; it is also deprived of a broader set of perspectives in the design of critical information systems.

Out of the 9.5 million people who are currently working in Nepal, only 1.5 million (16 per cent) are paid employment.  Out of this number, 1.2 million are men and less than 400, 00 are women.  Eighty-two per cent of employed women are self-employed vs. 12 per cent of those who are wage-employed.  In some ethnic communities especially in the Newars and Tibeto-Burman highland groups such as the Sherpas, Gurungs or Thakalis, women entrepreneurs have traditionally been present, buy the idea of women in business has only recently spread throughout the whole country.  Women normally work more hours than men and rural women work more hours than women urban areas.

The importance of gender aware macro-economic analysis has increased with many developing countries, including India, embarking upon Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs), since women and men are differentially affected by such programmes.

The informal economy has been characterized by a high level of participation by women.  Therefore a discussion of the informal economy is intertwined with the work of women.  Results of the October (199) Household Survey showed that among employed women, the largest portion was in elementary (19.4%), domestic (17.8%) and clerical occupations (16.3%) whereas among employed men the largest portion (19.6%) was in artisan and craft related occupations.  However both women's work and the informal sector have largely been discounted as marginal to the ‘real' economy and therefore been historically neglected in most scholarship on the economy and the labour market.

This discussion paper is an outcome of two converging initiatives.  Firstly, in order to assess the work accomplished by the ILO on Decent Work and women-specific and gender equality topics, an initial mapping exercise on existing research conducted by Headquarters and field offices was undertaken in 2007.  The first findings from this mapping exercise were presented at the Workshop "Gender Equality and Decent Work: Towards a Comprehensive Research Strategy" in May 2007