A parliamentary event organized by the Inter-Parliamentary Union and UN Women at CSW61

The parliamentary event at the 61st Session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) will be held in New York on 17 March 2017. The event, entitled Empowering parliaments to empower women; Making the economy work for women, is hosted by the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women).

The event will focus on the paramount role parliaments can play in identifying and addressing obstacles to women’s economic empowerment, in ensuring that social and economic policies answer men and women’s needs, and in monitoring their implementation and actual impact.

The morning session will focus on measures to lift the barriers to women’s economic empowerment.  It will look in particular at how discrimination in customary and legal norms related to marriage, inheritance, land, property and personal status, and the lack of measures to combat violence against women, constitute major obstacles to women’s economic empowerment and how to tackle them.

Two sessions will take place in the afternoon. The first, on empowering women at work, will focus, among other items, on what policies have proven most useful in ensuring gender equality at work and addressing sexual harassment; what policies, laws and programmes can best contribute to sharing unpaid care work more equally among men and women. The second session will focus on parliaments’ role in promoting the financial inclusion of women, including but not limited to, contributing to mapping out women’s needs; regulating the financial sector and ensuring that a gender perspective is applied in the design and implementation of fiscal and budget policies.

Finally, the meeting will provide an opportunity to contribute to the debates at the CSW whose priority theme this year is “Women’s economic empowerment in the changing world of work”.

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