The 69th meeting of the UN's Commission on the Status of Women (CSW69) marked the 30th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women which took place in 1995 in Beijing, China. It was Jennifer Bushee’s first time attending the CSW in New York. The following are some of her key insights from the plenitude of sessions addressing topics as diverse as pushback on rights and gender; gender justice; climate justice; economic justice; and Big Tech
Equity and Economic Sense
Unpaid labour continues to be a major concern. UNRISD’s session, “Addressing structural barriers for progress on the BPfA [Beijing Platform for Action]: Financing Care systems as a development strategy” on 19 March addressed the problems of not remunerating childcare, eldercare, support for individuals with disabilities, and domestic labor. The work is essential for functioning societies, but remains undervalued, invisible, and unevenly distributed—disproportionately impacting women and girls. Globally, unpaid care work constitutes 9% of global GDP. For Latin America and the Caribbean, unpaid care represents 21.4% of GDP and women contribute three-fourths.
Speakers argued for policies supporting women's economic participation: childcare, paid parent leave, and flexible work arrangements. It’s a matter of equity but also a matter of economic sense. It would allow full harnessing of women's productivity. We need gender policies applied to financing policies. We need gender responsive budgets that take care into account. We also need to invest in infrastructure for care. We can’t speak of domestic investment in care, if the fiscal space isn’t there due to money sapped from the public sector to service loans, failure to tax the rich, or illicit money flows. Care needs to be visible and understood as a public good.
Economic justice
Another running theme was the need to interrogate our economic system. As Bhumika Muchhala (Political Economist and Senior Advisor at the Third World Network) put it at a 11 March NOOR session, “Financing Fascism and Fundamentalism: Corporate Funding Flows Sowing Hate”, capitalism is a system of exclusion at its core. It defines the global economic hierarchy and perpetuates colonialism (as predatory extraction). Wall Street’s way of working is invisibilised but supports oppression. The State is deployed in financialization.
Participants in this session, but also at several other sessions at the CSW, warned that the shift to the far right will increase harmful impacts of capitalism. It will also make it harder to address corruption. As part of Trump’s executive order on digital assets issued in January 2024, the US government would set up a reserve slated to hold five cryptocurrencies (bitcoin, ether, XRP, solana and cardanon). This would allow the rich to store their wealth and use their wealth to buy influence without being tracked.
Big Tech and the Far Right
At the session “Big Tech and the Far Right”, speakers discussed how the Far Right benefits from the digital industry. Content we post online and our personal data serve as the input in the digital industry’s value chain. The algorithms, by which value is added to these “raw resources”, produce outputs which consist of our interactions—liking and commenting. Data from these are fed back into algorithms, along with our further content and data, to produce more interactions. And so on. This is then monetized through the sale of advertising and our data. Inflammatory speech, think Andrew Tate and his misogyny, produces more interactions, which means more of the same types of comments are distributed (echo chambers) and more opportunities for advertising. The Far Right’s hate is a money machine for Big Tech.
“Tech facilitates gender-based violence” was something I heard often at the CSW. And violence online in combination with toxic masculinity results in gender-based violence (GBV) beyond the virtual space. Several sessions argued for feminist tech including feminist approaches to internet governance. One side event organised by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) on 17 March introduced feminist principles, which they developed to help counter online hatred and bullying of women and girls.
Climate Justice
Many feminist organisations at the CSW work on climate justice and view this as integral to gender justice. Women and girls are heavily affected by climate collapse, with risks being most acute for women with compounded vulnerabilities such as indigenous women with disabilities and poor women and girls living in rural areas. Agriculture is quickly affected by climate change. This puts women at major risk since agriculture is the most important employment sector for women in low- and lower-middle income countries, and women are disproportionately dependent on subsistence agriculture. When crops fail women suffer. They need to work harder or at informal jobs to secure resources. This puts added pressure on girls, who may leave school to help earn income.
When there is a disaster, such as flooding, women are more likely to die and be injured due to reduced access to information, mobility, decision-making, and access to resources and training. As survivors, women have less access to relief and assistance. Climate collapse also directly endangers women and girls’ health. For example, extreme heat increases incidence of stillbirth, and contributes to the spread of vector-borne illnesses like malaria, which are linked to worse maternal and neonatal outcomes.
Contagious Pushback?
Discussions about the rise of authoritarianism, the extreme right and anti-rights and anti-gender movements dominated this CSW. Participants at Ford Foundation’s 10 March meeting spoke of contagion: Argentina’s Ministry of Women, Genders & Diversity has been dissolved and its president Milei plans to strike femicide from law. Bans on female genital cutting in Gambia, thought uncontroversial, have been questioned. The European Conservatives and Reformists Party are planning a “Make Europe Great Again” conference and there is a new civil society initiative called, “DOGE-UN”. Not quite uplifting.
On the other hand, I heard speakers stress the need to go beyond just equality and demand gender justice. Feminist struggles are not just about equal pay for equal work. They’re also about righting wrongs and taking a broad and open-minded approach to gender. The efforts I saw from anti-gender organisations that tried to destabilise the discussions (‘there are only two genders, yada yada") and plant seeds of discord were unsuccessful. Participants generally seemed aligned on the need to uphold expansive ideas of gender, welcoming non-binary and trans sisters and brothers.
Working across movements
So now what? Echoing an intersectional stance, feminists at all sessions I attended emphasized repeatedly the need to work across movements. There is a lot happening at the crossroads of gender and climate justice and many strong appeals for addressing economic justice as part of both of those areas of activism. The pushback also means emphasising working in solidarity. Some argued we need to worry less about being strategically aligned and instead focus on moving together tactically.
By Jennifer Bushee, Wemos (and one of the co-founders and former board members of WO=MEN)
*) Photo of Make Way partnership colleagues, Jennifer Bushee on the left, at the CSW in New York in front of the UN; Photo by Make Way
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