Today marked the first full day of sessions at CSW. I started my day at a session entitled Unpaid Work: an obstacle to real equality. It dealt with designing and implementing new policies to offer services, social protection and basic infrastructure to achieve real and effective equality. It was easily my favorite session of the day!
Care can not fall exclusively on the shoulders of only half the population. The keynote speaker talked about the difference between ideas and beliefs and the enormous bias in measuring economic worth. She also outlined the four modes of production: capitalist, state/public administration (as it relates to distributive wealth), voluntary sector and household. Every mode of production has it's own ethos. She introduced the notion of economics as a normative science instead of a descriptive science. We need to acknowledge economics as a social science and work to make it as a semi-foolproof predictive science. I was floored to come to the realization in this session that any change to one country has repercussions for another.
From the session I was able to draw the conclusion that, the first component of the pay for care giving should be the minimum wage in addition to taxes, social protection and profit to compensate businesses for their risk. We must keep in mind the Iron Law of Care: people most in need are the ones that often can't pay for the services they require. Just consider the amount of care people with degenerative diseases require.
In addition to that session, I attended a few others including one concerning sexual harassment within government bodies and an official meeting in the General Assembly, that featured: the Presidents of Trinidad and Tobago, Lithuania, Nepal, Croatia and Estonia. And they were all women!!!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Great that little girls in those countries have such role models as their leaders!
ReplyDelete