Making change happen - how can the SIGI help?

 I really couldn’t understand in the first reading what was so extraordinarily remarkable about the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) of the OECD.  The website  tells us that it is one of official data sources for monitoring SDG Indicator 5.1.1 on “Whether or not legal frameworks are in place to promote, enforce and monitor gender equality and women’s empowerment”, together with UN Women and the World Bank Group’s Women Business and the Law.  Well and good.  As an advocate for human rights in general, and women’s human rights in particular, I welcome the increase in  the body of quantitative data available in areas that are key to holding states accountable for fulfilling their obligations under CEDAW (especially) and other treaty bodies .  It’s exciting too to learn that SIGI's second dimension, related to #physicalintegrity of women, has spurred the development of mechanisms to enable access to justice for victims of sexual abuse, promoting the prevention and comprehensive treatment of #violenceagainstwomen in Colombia and that it has led to  the consideration of a National Strategy against "#machismo", aimed at transforming cultural imaginaries and sexist #genderstereotypes (see https://www.linkedin.com/posts/capelaezp_gender-sigi-women-activity-7048000606740869121-8HY2?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop)  I would love to know where else in the global south such a statistical index could have so much influence and how women’s rights organisations working hard to achieve similar outcomes could leverage this power of statistical knowledge.  Sadly, my experience in my home country of Sri Lanka and other parts of Asia, shows that policy makers seem to be driven more by political expediency and/or self-interest than statistical evidence! 

Statistical evidence has its limitations!  We all know that  different groups of women and girls are differentially impacted by the  various restrictions on their rights as described in the SIGI, and so  aggregated quantitative data does not cover the multiple discriminations that many marginalised groups face.  I would think that it is important  to complement statistical indices with stories on the lived realities of these women and girls.  In IWRAW Asia Pacific where I have been working for the last seven years, we have been privileged to be able to hear and learn from the stories of many marginalised groups  such as sex workers, migrant and refugee women, ethnic minority, Indigenous and rural women and the LBTQI community.  What they tell us is that they have little or no access to justice; that their rights are violated with impunity, and that the state, society and legal community do very little to protect their rights or enable redress.  This is not because the countries they live in don’t have laws to protect them or because their governments haven’t signed up to those human rights treaties that oblige them to eradicate discrimination, to protect women from violence and to ensure that their economic, social, cultural rights AND their civil and political rights are fulfilled.  It is because laws and legal frameworks are not implemented, and global normative standards are not adhered to, not by states nor by non-state actors.

Since 2016, IWRAW Asia Pacific has been co-organising the Global South Women’s Forum on Sustainable Development  where women from the global south set the agenda and come together to talk about issues that are of concern to them.  In 2021 we co-created the Global South Women’s Forum on Environmental Justice.  At this even we heard women from Uganda’s west Albertine rift area and women from villages in Western DRC talk about how corporations and governments acquired community land for building an oil refinery and building mega hydro projects.  The land was acquired without free prior informed consent or commensurate compensation.  This despite the existence of strong safe guarding policies that exist to reduce the negative impact of such projects on vulnerable communities, and the adoption by IFIs of policy frameworks for dealing with forced displacement.  Some of the women in Uganda and DRC were able to fight this illegal land grabbling successfully in court but mostly these corporations intimidated those who were illiterate and unaware of their rights, and seduced them with  false promises.

Last year 2022,  the Global South Women’s Forum hosted a Global Tribunal for Women Workers co-created with 28 other organisations from the labour and women’s movements. 73 women gave their testimonies from 24 different countries and 12 different sectors of the labour market. There were sex workers, entertainment workers, migrant workers, street sweepers, street vendors, home-based workers, workers in offices, hospital cleaners, domestic workers and agricultural workers. And they told us, in 16 different languages, how they were exploited sexually and financially, how their health needs were not considered, how they were intimidated from organising themselves and from joining unions, and how there was no equal pay for work of equal value. Each of them had a story to tell about how their employers violated their rights, and how the authorities and society at large took no notice, or worse, stigmatised them and discriminated against them. Many were speaking out for the first time; all of them wished for the world to listen to them. They wanted redress for the harms done to them. But mostly, they were speaking out because they didn’t want these harms repeated to other women, anywhere.

And once again, it is not that many of the countries represented did NOT have laws that were designed to protect their rights. If you take my own country, Sri Lanka, we have a portfolio of labour laws that protect workers and are the result of a history of a strong socialist labour movement - yet many of them are only observed in the breach. We know for instance that in the apparel industry, despite statutory entitlements of 7 days sick leave, and 14 days annual leave, most workers exercising their right to take leave are often forced to forego their attendance bonuses, and that requests for leave are met with reprimands and disciplinary actions. Sri Lanka’s Maternity Benefits Ordinance stipulates that the employer should provide nursing facilities or time out to workers for nursing their children, but these are almost never provided to lactating mothers. So women juggling their care responsibilities opt out of the formal system and work as informal labour, hired through what we in Sri Lanka call manpower agencies. These unregulated manpower agencies supply workers to the apparel industry and the system allows employers to circumvent the labour laws and pay lower wages. This whole scenario is an exploitation of society’s gender norms and stereotyping of women as primary caregivers.

This is just one example. Among the stories of workers who are from ethnic minorities, who are migrants, who are gender non-conforming, who work in Lebanon, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Malaysia, the exploitation is no different, sometimes worse. A preoccupation with citizenship, nationality and immigration status creates tiered systems whereby some workers are better protected while others are more easily exploited; the same applies to those in formal versus informal economies. And for women with disabilities, you can forget the rights AT work - the right TO work is also a challenge.

So while SIGI may show us what laws exist and what do not, we must recognise that  just reforming laws or expanding the  statute book does not  in themselves foster gender equality. Laws must be implemented and those who breach them must be held accountable to those laws - be they governments or employers, and most definitely corporations that control the global value chains.  Many of these corporations have their head offices and shareholders in the countries of the OECD whose governments have extraterritorial obligations. Women also need to be aware of their rights, to have the civic space to organise and the means to access justice. Discrimination cannot be eradicated by reforming the legal system if we continue to prioritise attracting FDIs over compliance, or if we do not protect women’s human rights in our trade agreements, or if transnational corporations continue to consider profits more important than women’s lives.

A slightly different version of this was presented at the launch of the OECD Development Social Institutions and #gender Index (#SIGI) 2023, where it went down like a lead balloon.

C’est la vie.