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A14 LOCAL
Monday 26 June 2017
Alicia Bárcena calls on women to break the glass ceiling
(June 21, 2017) During a said.
presentation in the frame- This is compounded by the
work of the Forbes Power- wide wage gap between
ful Women Forum 2017, men and women, which
ECLAC’s Executive Secre- still stands at 18% in the
tary stressed the need to region. “This is not fair. We
achieve equality with en- have to fight so that wom-
titlement to rights. en with similar jobs receive
Women must break the the same pay as men,”
glass ceiling through ECLAC’s top representa-
emancipation and politi- tive stated.
cal, physical and econom- In terms of physical auton-
ic autonomy. omy, Alicia Bárcena em-
Alicia Bárcena, Executive phasized that sexual and
Secretary of the Econom- reproductive rights are es-
ic Commission for Latin sential: “It’s about decid-
America and the Carib- ing about ourselves; our
bean (ECLAC), sustained body, our territory.”
today during a presenta- She added that officials
tion at the Forbes Powerful must effectively address
Women Forum 2017, held must achieve equality but She said that women’s an’s face in the region. teenage pregnancy,
in Mexico City. with entitlement to rights, economic autonomy is In Latin America and the which is one of the deep-
The most senior represen- “not to have more or less fundamental because it Caribbean, 75 million peo- est expressions of inequal-
tative of the United Nations money, not to have more represents true emancipa- ple suffer extreme poverty, ity and mainly affects the
poorest
populations
in
regional body indicated or fewer means, not just for tion. However, she warned while 185 million live in situ- Latin American and Ca-
that women in the region our own individual will.” that poverty wears a wom- ations of poverty, Bárcena ribbean societies. She also
urged for eliminating ma-
ternal mortality and raising
the visibility of its indicators.
The senior United Nations
official warned that “the
great scourge that still per-
sists in our region is violence
against women,” adding
that, despite multiple initia-
tives, it continues to be a
grave problem, not only in
poor households but also in
high-income ones.
With regard to decision-
making, women need
more participation in hi-
erarchical positions and
greater access to owner-
ship of financial assets and
property, she affirmed.
Bárcena noted that the
presence of women in
spheres of power does not
surpass 30%.
ECLAC’s Executive Sec-
retary recalled that gen-
der equality is an axis of
the 2030 Agenda for Sus-
tainable Development, a
roadmap that puts equal-
ity at the center, especially
gender equality.
She specified that there
are three indispensable
policy objectives that must
be applied in order to
achieve equality for wom-
en: redistributing income
and time, which takes the
care economy into ac-
count; breaking the statisti-
cal silence to raise visibility
of women’s situations; and,
finally, pushing for deliber-
ate public policies aimed
at resolving sex-based in-
equality gaps. q
