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Key Text Who Answers to Women?

Author: UNIFEM
Date: 2008
Size: 16 pages (435 KB)

Summary

How can accountability systems become more gender-responsive? This introductory chapter of a study from UNIFEM examines how women, including the most excluded women, are strengthening their capacity to identify accountability gaps and call for redress. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and other international commitments to women will only be met if gender-responsive accountability systems are put in place both nationally and internationally.

Gender inequality is a major factor holding back achievement of the MDGs. It reduces the capacity of poor women to work their way of out of poverty, which exacerbates unequal and inefficient allocation of resources. Gender inequality also increases non-monetary aspects of poverty too: the lack of opportunities, voice and security, all of which make the poor more vulnerable to economic, environmental or political shocks. This continuing discrimination after decades of national and international declarations and commitments to build gender equality indicates an accountability crisis.

Women’s efforts to remedy their situation when their rights are denied have ranged from ‘voice’-based approaches that emphasise collective action, representation of interests and the ability to demand change, to ‘choice’-based approaches that promote changes in the supply of responsive public services or fair market practices.

For ‘voice’ and ‘choice’ solutions to work, they must take into account the specific challenges that different groups of women face in asking for accountability. These include the following:

Women’s disadvantage in using accountability systems is based on their subordinate status in relation to men at home or as decision-makers, which constrains women’s ability to assert their rights.
Moving from ‘voice’ to influence requires institutional changes in the places where public decisions are implemented.
If women do not have security, power or resources as individuals or as an organised political interest, they cannot hold public or private institutions accountable.
If they cannot demand accountability, they are less able to determine collective goals. As a result, policymakers and providers are under-informed about women’s needs and preferences.
Women’s activism demonstrates that women sometimes experience governance failures differently from men.

Accountability systems that work for women should contain several essential elements. Women must be included in oversight processes. Gender-responsive accountability institutions must ensure that decision-makers answer to the women who are most affected by their decisions. Furthermore:

Women must be entitled to ask for explanations and justifications – they must be legitimate participants in public debates, power-delegation processes and performance assessments.
Advancing women’s human rights must be a key standard against which the performance of officials is assessed.
Power-holders must answer for their performance in advancing women’s rights. The standards of due diligence and probity in holding the public trust must include gender equality as a goal of public action.
In both ‘voice’- and ‘choice’-based accountability systems in public services, there needs to be institutional change, including new mandates, incentives, and gender-sensitive performance indicators that can be measured and monitored.
Participation by those women who are most affected by deficits in service provision is essential.

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Source: UNIFEM, 2008, 'Who Answers to Women?', in Progress of the World's Women 2008/9: Who Answers to Women? Gender and Accountability, United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), New York, ch. 1.
Organisation: United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), http://www.unifem.org