Gender Mainstreaming, Employment and Youth - UNECE

Gender equality is a pillar of Sustainable Development and is both one of the SDGs (SDG 5 “Achieve gender equality and empower women and girls”) and an enabler for the achievement of all the SDGs.

UNECE pursues a dual approach: gender considerations are mainstreamed across all areas of UNECE work, and additionally, targeted activities are organized under our Gender and Economy Programme. We assist our member States in implementing internationally agreed commitments to women's empowerment and gender equality, such as the Beijing Platform for Action and the Millennium Development Goals. We provide a regional platform for monitoring progress and research and facilitating exchange and policy learning through expert group meetings, workshops, and regional conferences.

The UNECE Statistical Division’s key deliverables include the production of gender-disaggregated statistics, available through the on-line gender database (updated on a yearly basis) as well as capacity-building activities for member countries.

In particular, UNECE organized:

• A work session on Gender in the SDGs (June 2016, Vilnius): www.unece.org/stats/documents/2016.6.gender.html.
• A regional capacity-building workshop on gender statistics for the EECCA countries (May 2016) was organized focusing on dissemination and communication of gender statistics, and on guiding countries in the production of gender-relevant and sex-disaggregated data to meet the statistical needs of the 2030 Agenda.

In the field of entrepreneurship, ECE’s Gender Focal Point organized, in cooperation with Israel’s Agency for International Development Cooperation, two international workshops for women entrepreneurs in Haifa, one on “Supporting Women Entrepreneurs for Sustainable Development” and one on “Use of Information and Communication Technologies for the Advancement of Small Businesses”. These capacity-building workshops are targeted mainly at women entrepreneurs from Central Asia and the Caucasus: http://www.unece.org/index.php?id=42701#/

In the field of trade, UNECE organized a panel session on how standards can contribute to the empowerment of women and girls, and to the achievement of SDG Goal 5 and how to ensure that they are gender-responsive and do not constitute – instead - a hidden barrier to gender equality.

To bring knowledge and open dialogue about the necessary steps to reduce gender inequalities in trade facilitation, UNECE through its intergovernmental body UN/CEFACT organizes conferences on Women in Trade Facilitation and supports quantitative and qualitative analysis about gender disparities in trade facilitation. Recently, UN/CEFACT has been working to a White Paper to address the lack of concepts and statistical tools that help to get information about trade facilitation for women.