Asia's women hit hard by financial crisis hears summit

PHOTO

Two Afghan women walk down a street in Kabul, Afghanistan on June, 2003. A major conference on women in Bangkok has heard that the world financial crisis has had a major impact on women across the region. [Getty Images]

Ron Corben

Last Updated: Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:20:00 +1100

A United Nations conference in Bangkok has heard that the world financial crisis has had a major impact on women across the Asia-Pacific region.

Over 300 women's representatives from 60 Asia Pacific countries were in Bangkok to review the gains made since the world conference on women in Beijing in 1995.

The summit comes ahead of a major meeting in New York in March next year.

Executive secretary of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP), Noeleen Heyzer spoke at the conference.

She told Radio Australia, women's economic security had been badly affected by the global financial crisis.

"You have a situation where the financial crisis hits the real economy...and when it comes to the sector on garments and electronics...it's women who are being affected," she said.

Joanne Sandler, deputy director general of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNFEM), says the global downturn has had far reaching effects on women that went well beyond job losses.

"We can already see linkages between the crisis and other social issues...for instance the way that the crisis is creating more informality less security for women workers."

"With things like violence against women, we're already seeing women who are going into more insecure areas of work who then become more vulnerable to sexual harassment, sexual violence."

Ms Sandler says governments are too often failing to include more women from key areas of society in setting policies in areas such as migration and women affected by AIDS.

But the global financial crisis isn't the only major threat to the security of women.

Growing threat

Dr Heyzer says extremism is a disturbing and growing threat.

"My greatest fear is that of the rise of extremism...because laws what we thought were archaic and that we actually have been able to show that these are dangerous laws to have in our societies, they are coming back," she said.

"In terms of stoning of women, the public caning of women, these are all the extremes...and it's not just Sharia law...[it's] in all religions of all areas, the rise of extremisms, that happens to be a major concern."

Different goals

But while there's agreement on the current threats of the global financial crisis, there's dissent on what future goals should be.

Devaki Jain, a leading Indian women's rights advocate says the experiences of women in developing countries are still often poorly understood by those in the industrialised world.

She says women are looking for a shift in the agenda from rights and violence against women, which she says are still critical, towards preserving, enhancing and protecting work for women in the developing world.

"The protection of rights is gradually taking place. But what is concerning us is that the kind of phenomena of experience of the women workers of the South countries like Africa, Latin America, and Asia is totally different from the poorest women in Scandinavia or America," she said.

"There's no social insurance, there's no sense that she's not eating at all, there's no sense that a child can't go to school because she has no job."

"You have to understand that the global economy has changed and that financing women is not the issue now, the issue is not to allow financial markets to be so free...the issue is totally different."