UNCTAD15 Gender and Development Forum: Opening ceremony

Statement by Rebeca Grynspan, Secretary-General of UNCTAD

Distinguished panelists and participants,

Ladies and gentlemen,

I welcome you to the Gender and Development Forum of of 15th conference of UNCTAD, whose theme "From inequality and vulnerability to prosperity for all" is more urgent than ever.

This is only my second week as UNCTAD Secretary General. With time you will get to know me, but I take this opportunity to assure you that I come with a great sense of responsibility, deeply aware of the incredibly testing times that we are in, but also deeply aware of what it means to be UNCTAD’s first female secretary-general.

I vow to you that, as I have done all my life, I will do all that I can to advance the gender equality agenda. We have a lot of work to do, and I ask you to count on me to do it together.   

We stand at a critical moment in the history of multilateralism, in the history of the United Nations, and in the history of UNCTAD itself.

The COVID-19 pandemic has proved to be one of the largest challenges of our generation, producing big setbacks in the hard-won progress in the reduction of poverty and inequality, and the progress made in the previous decades on gender equality and sustainable development. This crisis is not over, and many developing regions are seriously facing the prospect of another "lost decade" exactly at the time when efforts towards achieving the 2030 Agenda should be coming into full gear.

Unfortunately, the negative effect of this pandemic on gender equality has been even greater. According to the World Economic Forum, we women needed to wait 99 years to achieve full equality with men before the pandemic arrived. Now, after COVID-19, this already inexcusably high number has passed from 99 years to 136 years. So when it comes to gender, we are not talking about another lost decade. We are talking about almost four.

This is an unacceptable time span, especially considering that removing gender inequalities in all fields would be in line with human rights commitments, provide huge long-term societal benefits, foster solutions to climate change challenges, decrease instability globally and at the country level, and yield significant economic benefits. In a word,  decreasing the gender gap helps decrease all others.

Much therefore hinges on how much and how quickly we can revert and recover from these setbacks.

And here the news is mixed. As shown by our Trade and Development Report, released last week, we are witnessing a robust but divergent global recovery, with advanced countries growing and vaccinating at rates that are multiples of those in the developing world, who have borne the greatest brunt of all. In a word: if we follow the current trajectory, this is a recovery that will leave many people behind, a recovery that will widen gaps. This will not be “prosperity for all”.

Behind this recovery divergence lurks one of the greatest lessons of this pandemic. Where there is inequality, there is fragility, and when shocks come, gaps widen, and those that were already suffering, suffer the most. In a world where shocks are increasingly common, we must see that the pre-pandemic "business as usual" was leading us only to the mirage of progress, to development that was only temporary and therefore unsustainable. That is why we include more and more the word resilience in our Sustainable Development Goals. Because shocks should not shock us any longer.

Dear delegates,

We must be very clear about this: Economic downturns such as the COVID-19 pandemic are not gender neutral. They affect men and women differently, mainly because of gender-segmentation into different industries and occupations, the structure of markets and institutions and the inequalities within them and the still disproportionate burden on women of the care and domestic world. We know that unless we solve these inequalities the pursuit of the SDGs is not possible. We know 53 of the 251 SDG indicators make explicit reference to gender equality, women and girls. Therefore, reacting to the COVID-19 pandemic without assessing its distinct impact on men and women, jeopardizes the overall achievement of the 2030 Agenda and risks reversing the progress achieved so far in closing most gaps in most domains. And we know that unless women are sitting at the table, in the decision making processes, the policy decision that will be taken will be very probably biased, gender-blind and much less effective to recover from the crisis. Because women are an important part of the solution because they are a transformative and indispensable force to build back better. Unfortunately, we do not see this happening as we expected and as the world needs.

This Gender and Development Forum is an opportunity to help. It will provide a critical space of debate and reflection on a wide range of issues – from agriculture to industrial policies, from education and training to labour market needs, from environmental challenges to human rights-based solutions.

Against the backdrop of rising inequalities worldwide, there is a need to align economic, trade, labour and environmental policies – to mention a few – to human rights principles. The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, as well as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, among others, make clear calls on governments to ensure that their trade policies do not have adverse impacts on women.

Thanks to our collective effort these past years, the number of initiatives that aim to "mainstream" gender into trade have rapidly increased over time.

The new initiatives taken by the trade community, for example, specific trade and gender chapters included in Free Trade Agreements, ex-ante assessments of the likely gender impacts of trade reforms, and initiatives taken multilaterally or by groups of like-minded countries are welcome and show a new way of looking at the nexus between trade policy and gender equality and a commitment to use trade policy to empower women.

Nevertheless, we should not be complacent with what has been achieved so far. While trade has created new opportunities for some women, it has also marginalized others. Rural women are often unable to compete with imported products, especially if such products benefit from generous subsidies, with crowding out effects – new wage employment opportunities have become available to women, but very often for "blue collar" jobs only. The services sector is becoming the main employer of women, accounting for 58% of female employment worldwide. Still, women tend to be clustered in low-skill, non-tradable sub-sectors.

We need to move from a narrow focus on bringing women into trade, to a broader view that ensures that they engage under fair terms and that countries have the space to put in place policies that allow this to happen.

And these are but a few of the challenges, all of which are complex and require of us solutions that are nuanced, holistic and far-reaching.

Dear delegates,

There is much work ahead and the stakes could not be higher. It should be very clear to us all that the current recovery is insufficient and unsatisfactory for both society at large and for women in particular. We must increase our efforts, and every one of us should be empowered by the recognition that there is much each of us can do to help.

We hope that the discussions that will take place during this Forum will provide important inputs for the deliberations of UNCTAD15 and for our future mandate on gender issues, which I hope to make a key priority of my leadership.

To conclude, I wish to thank the government of Barbados, our host for UNCTAD15, as well as our co-organizers of this forum, for making this crucial event possible. Thank you to Prime Minister Mottley for her inspiring leadership. And let me thank also all the women who fought for our rights before us and who allowed us to be where we are today – so we always remember that this is a collective fight.

I look forward to your declaration and wish you all very fruitful deliberations ahead.

Thank you.