Featured Resources
Progress of the World's Women 2002, Volume 2 (2002). "Progress of the Worlds Women 2002" provides a snapshot of the state of womens lives around the world and how much further we have to go to achieve equality. The report is the second edition of a biennial publication first produced in 2000 to track and measure the world's commitment to gender equality. It assesses improvements made towards women's empowerment within the context of the Millennium Development Goals. more »
Pathway to Gender Equality: CEDAW, Beijing and the MDGs (2004). "Pathway to Gender Equality" details how the synergy between CEDAW, the Beijing Platform for Action and the Millennium Development Goals can be used to generate a wealth of understanding and knowledge that portrays the nature of gender-based discrimination and defines the steps needed to achieve gender equality. more »Progress of the World’s Women 2005
Launched on 31 August 2005 in anticipation of the 2005 World Summit, this year's edition of UNIFEM's flagship publication marks the fifth anniversary of the UN Millennium Declaration and the tenth anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action.
It argues that unless governments and policymakers pay more attention to employment, and its links to poverty, the campaign to make poverty history will not succeed, and the hope for gender equality will founder on the reality of women’s growing economic insecurity.
“Progress of the World’s Women 2005: Women, Work and Poverty” makes the case for an increased focus on women’s informal employment as a key pathway to reducing poverty and strengthening women’s economic security. It provides the latest available data on the size and composition of the informal economy and compares national data on average earnings and poverty risk across different segments of the informal and formal workforces in six developing countries and one developed country to show the links between employment, gender and poverty. It looks at the costs and benefits of informal work and their consequences for women’s economic security. Finally, it provides a strategic framework — with good practice examples — for how to promote decent work for women informal workers, and shows why strong organizations of workers in the informal economy are vital to effective policy reforms.
This report can and should be used as a call to action to help advocates, policy makers, governments and the international community “make poverty history.”
Author(s): Martha Chen, Joann Vanek, Francie Lund, James Heintz, with Renana Jhabvala and Christine Bonner
