According to a major report of the United Nations dated 20th October, gender equality is an essential and integral part of sustainable development (Sustainabledevelopment.un.org 2018). Without thinking of reducing the inequality done to women in many ways such as unavailability of decent jobs, inadequate wages distribution for informal and agricultural women, gender-specific employment policies and labor market regulation, a sustainable development is hard to be attained. Indeed, gender equality or ensuring equality for women is a way to pursue political participation and economic opportunity and is essential to attain or promote a sustainable development (Chant 2016).
The main purpose of this assignment is to analyze and review one of the 17 goals of sustainable development of the United Nations. The chosen goal is ‘Gender Equality’. The study also recommends a few points based on the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) and a model.
For a sustainable development, it is important to have a supportive and progressive external environment such as political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legal. One of the goals of UN’s sustainable development is to promote the ‘gender equality’. The goal could be attained if there is a proper structure to support women equality at the different levels of society. However, there are huge gaps between the current and the desired states. The current state signifies a significant amount of partially being done to women living in villages or in urban areas. It is very difficult to identify the reasons for such inequalities as data can only indicate figures, not the exact scenario. Considering all those stated, following structures need to be improved in order to attain the ‘Gender Equality’ (GSDRC 2018):
Women do also have a very minimal political presence than in comparison to men. Institutions, cultural and socioeconomic boundaries limit their growth to the political position. ‘Politics’ is often considered to be a men domain. In addition, political parties wish to be dominated by men not women. This also limits the selection of women in political parties. Many women do not have power and guts to go against the negative views for them. Until and unless there are adequate supports from the government and that women are curious to enter politics, the current scenario of women’s formal participation and presentation won’t change.
Women, both at the political and the organizational level have a very minimal presence of theirs. At the organizational level, the top managerial positions mostly have the men. It is due to a long list of assumptions, which suggest that women are less competitive, innovative and hard-working than men. It is also an assumption that women are made for looking after their children. It is due to this they will not be able to be regular with their jobs. Women enjoy an informal recognition at the organizational and societal levels; however, they do not so at the leadership position. They are informally recognized as mothers, teachers, entrepreneurs, volunteers, community leaders and others. These representation needs to be harnessed and formalized in order to support a sustainable development.
The existing gender-responsive budgeting is unfavorable to all groups of women. It means that budgets are not equally distributed among society. There is no such system to judge whether unfairness is done to women in regard to budgeting. There is also no such system to know the appropriate areas to invest. According to an ‘Environment and Gender Index’ released by the ‘International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)’, data collected from 72 countries on different domains such as economics, forestry, agriculture, marine resources, energy, water and infrastructure are typically the men-oriented (IUCN 2018). It does not show the participation of women at various levels. The fact strongly suggests a gender bias. In order to attain a sustainable development, it is necessary that gender-responsive budgeting undergoes significant changes. There is a need for a shift in thinking and practice for the designing and implementation of budgets. It opens up options to ambitious initiatives to a larger group of stakeholders, acknowledgment to the care economy and prioritizing the equality (Naikoo, Thakur and Guroo 2018).
Stakeholders
According to Mitchell et al’s article “Toward a theory of stakeholder identification and salience: defining the principle of and what really counts”, stakeholders are those that affect the business or are affected from the business (Sdg.iisd.org 2018). Based on the article, these are the stakeholders (Sdg.iisd.org 2018):
Women
Since the goal of ‘Gender Equality’ is aimed at uplifting the living standard of women at the various stages in their lives such as at childhood, adolescent and adultery stages, they are going to be affected form the sustainable development program of UN. Hence, according to the Mitchell et al’s article, women are one of the stakeholders.
The UN declared representatives from each member state are also the stakeholders. They make and approve federal laws. A civil society is that, which are publically unrecognized but are involved in doing wellbeing activities. Examples include like NGOs.
There is a strong relationship between women and other stakeholders. The member state and civil society representatives are engaged in doing the right thing to ensure that the UN’s goal of attaining ‘Gender Equality’ is made possible. Women representatives in UN were the one to form a forum of stakeholders comprising of representatives of member states and civil society to be able to know the progress of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). UN Women in collaboration with the women convened forum have identified a few goals to be addressed to attain gender equality. Those goals include controlling the violence against girls and women, equal opportunities to resources, leadership and participation. UN Women and the forum of stakeholders had identified a few issues to be addressed such as factors that drive poverty and inappropriately affect women and the need to reduce or close the gap that is there between legislation and implementation.
The UN Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) are (Unprme.org 2018):
Principle 1: Purpose- The main purpose is to provide ample opportunity to students, so that, they become a good person and a qualified professional. If this happens they will be able to lead the society much better than what is it now. At large, they will be able to work for the sustainable global economy.
Principle 2: Values- The purpose is to incorporate the values of global social responsibility into academics, study curriculum and organizational practices. Responsibilities are as portrayed in international initiatives like the United Nations (UN) Global Compact.
Principle 3: Method- There are plans to consider changes in educational frameworks, processes, materials and environments to enable an effective learning experience and support the production of responsible leadership.
Principle 4: Research- There are plans for getting involved into empirical and conceptual research works to support an advancement towards understanding the role, dynamics and influence the corporations for creating of an environment, society and economy, which is sustainable.
Principle 5: Partnership- There are plans to interact with business managers to encourage them towards sustainable practices. The interaction will also widen up the knowledge to be able to meet the social and environmental responsibilities. The member state and civil society representatives, women and business organizations can together work towards ensuring that societal issues get resolved and that there are progressive trends for ‘Gender Equality’.
Principle 6: Dialogue- There are plans to promote and engage debates and dialogues between various bodies such as civil society organizations, business, media, government, students, educators, consumers, and other interested stakeholders and groups on issues, which are critical. Issues include such as related to sustainability and global social responsibility.
However, it is hard to be realized an easy win-win relationship between gender equality and sustainable development. Indeed, this may affect the lives of women as they are being figured out to be a policy focus. They are being represented as sustainability saviors, which can stereotype their roles in relation to their work, family, community and the environment. Such responsibilities will add up additional pressure on women along with their substantial unpaid work and care pressures. This is problematic for women considering the change in roles to play and also that there is no confirmation on part of conferring rights, benefits and resources. Power imbalances in regards to gender relations do indicate a challenging road ahead for women. Women are cross-cut by other at different levels of their representation. Hence, it is very difficult to say whether the proposed goals could be realized in practice (Dineen and Le 2015).
There will also be the needs for analysis being done on tensions, interactions, and trade-offs between men and women. The sustainability progress in that context would be needed to be identified. Attention will need to pay to structural foundations for gender-specific discrimination and the related challenges. For example, recent attention to women and girl in terms of policy in the United Kingdom where all laudable in larger aspects. From the ‘girl effect’ campaigning to debates for UK’s Girl Summit, these policies often lacked a relational perspective. Indeed, women and girls are treated in a way that they are saviors, individual victims and development beneficiaries. This will ultimately fail to empower women and girls. If goal 5 of UN’s 17 goals is to live up to the expectations, there is a need for a structural change that pays attention to gendered power relations. This should be the center stage to policymakers, stakeholders of ‘gender equality’ and the women (Rani and Yadeta 2016).
There are a number of models that can be used to recommend two ways to help organizations achieve the goal of attaining ‘Gender Equality’. However, in this study 3-Nested-Dependencies Model will only be used. The model gives a strong importance to society and says that it is their people who decide what model of an economy they will use. They can also change their model of the economy on being not satisfied with it. The model assumes society as an economic shaper. It explains this with an example of an economic downturn, which seriously affects the quality of life. The model identifies that good jobs are very critical for a vibrant society. In all these ways, the model acknowledges the importance of society in the sustainable development of a country. Therefore, the model can be used to recommend a few things to organizations involved in taking care of UN’s 17 goals in specific the goal 5 ‘Gender Equality’. Recommendations are (Sen and Mukherjee 2014):
Conclusion
In summary, this can be concluded that there is a need for a structural change throughout everything from study curriculum and the environment in academics to federal policies and to the support from organizations. There is a need for the effective monitoring of gender-specific practices in organizations, communities and societies. This is necessary to ensure that unfair and biased practices are not only recognized but are also approached to be controlled. In addition, the forum of stakeholders such as representatives of states and civil societies and the women must all contribute to the goal. Women need to be empowered not just to help them realize their rights but also to help them through attaining the goal 5 of UN’s 17 goals, which is ‘Gender Equality’. They should be helped in maintaining a balance between women empowerment and their personal and professional lives to help them avoid the negative consequences of emphasizing a lot on ‘Gender Equality’.
References
Chant, S., 2016. Women, girls and world poverty: empowerment, equality or essentialism?. International Development Planning Review, 38(1), pp.1-24.
Dineen, K. and Le, Q.V., 2015. The impact of an integrated microcredit program on the empowerment of women and gender equality in rural Vietnam. The Journal of Developing Areas, 49(1), pp.23-38.
GSDRC 2018. Gender and governance – GSDRC. [online] GSDRC. Available at: https://gsdrc.org/topic-guides/gender/gender-and-governance/ [Accessed 9 Oct. 2018].
IUCN 2018. Home. [online] IUCN. Available at: https://www.iucn.org/theme/gender [Accessed 9 Oct. 2018].
Naikoo, A.A., Thakur, S.S. and Guroo, T.A., 2018. Women empowerment and gender equality under MGNREGA a great revolution in rural life. International Journal for Advance Research and Development, 3(3), pp.303-308.
Rani, D.L. and Yadeta, D.B., 2016. Empowerment of rural women through cooperative: A case of saving and credit cooperative society of Dendi district, Oromia regional state. Ethiopia. International Journal of Applied Research, 2(8), pp.367-373.
Sdg.iisd.org 2018. Stakeholders Call for Gender Equality Goal | News | SDG Knowledge Hub | IISD. [online] Sdg.iisd.org. Available at: https://sdg.iisd.org/news/stakeholders-call-for-gender-equality-goal/ [Accessed 9 Oct. 2018].
Sen, G. and Mukherjee, A., 2014. No empowerment without rights, no rights without politics: Gender-equality, MDGs and the post-2015 development agenda. Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 15(2-3), pp.188-202.
Sustainabledevelopment.un.org 2018. SDGs .:. Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform. [online] Sustainabledevelopment.un.org. Available at: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs [Accessed 9 Oct. 2018].
Unprme.org 2018. PRME – About Us – Six Principles. [online] Unprme.org. Available at: https://www.unprme.org/about-prme/the-six-principles.php [Accessed 9 Oct. 2018].
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