'Gender Comment': Why does the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights need a General Comment on Women?

Abstract

This article argues that the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights needs to promote a substantive approach to equality in its anticipated General Comment (interpretive statement) on women's equal enjoyment of the rights enumerated in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 1966 (article 3). The achievement of substantive gender equality relies on two main commitments: tackling the structural causes of women's inequality and recognizing women's different experiences and contexts in a way that is consistent with equality. The article begins by providing a general overview of the elaboration of General Comments by the UN human rights treaty committees, with a particular focus on the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Right's work in this area. Secondly, it examines the inadequate treatment of gender issues in the General Comments adopted by the treaty committees in the past. It also maps the recent trend to adopt General Comments relating specifically to women's enjoyment of human rights, which has followed from the commitments to mainstreaming women's human rights made at the 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights and the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women. The article describes and critically welcomes the different approaches to gender mainstreaming taken by the Human Rights Committee and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, in their General Comments on women. Thirdly, the article argues that just adding to the existing human rights paradigm is not enough to ensure the indivisibility of women's human rights, without also attending to the structural causes of women's marginalisation and exclusion, and to the diversity of women's experience. It suggests how the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights should incorporate an appreciation of the historical, cultural, traditional and religious contexts within which women's inequality has been normalized into the concept of equality elaborated in the anticipated General Comment. In addition, the article argues the need to recognize that an important component of promoting structural change is the need to modify gender stereotypes and hierarchies by changing notions of masculine privilege, as well as female subservience, and that much can be learned from the work of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women in this regard. In the face of women's enduring economic, social and cultural disadvantage, the elaboration of a General Comment on women's equal enjoyment of economic, social and cultural rights is an indispensable tool in the continuing struggle to resist the gendered (masculine) subjectivity of human rights law and reconstruct its norms so that women are fully included.