Gender Equality

This article uses the ten year anniversary of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, marked by the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in August 2002, to explore ways in which women have, or have not, become more involved in environmental decision making and whether prerequisites for this involvement (for example equitable education, health care and economic status) are being met. It opens by explaining why Women have been identified as a coherent group which should be the focus of attention, by focusing on their relatively poor (compared to men) economic and social status and their disproportionately high involvement in tasks which are unpaid or otherwise undervalued. Women's involvement in Agenda 21 and the resulting document which specifically refers to the need to improve women's health, education, economic position and involvement in decision making is reviewed before considering how far Progress has been made in these areas. The article concludes that, while some improvements appear to have been made, these are by no means uniform across space and time and that persistent inequalities continue to exist, and indeed have emerged in some of the new concerns identified by the UN.

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