Good News, UN Approves Mechanism to Assist States Eliminate Laws Which Discriminate Women
After much determination and hard work, not least by women rights activists around the world, the United Nation Human Rights Council has adopted a consensus to create a UN Working Group which aims at accelerating the elimination of discriminatory laws against women. The Group’s roles include helping States to fulfill their commitment to eliminate discrimination against women, highlighting gaps and making recommendations. This is indeed a cause for celebration although admittedly much more work is to be done.
However, I welcome this as a step forward since CEDAW and the Beijing Conference. Empowering women is not only a fundamental human rights duty but when we empower women; we are essentially increasing the capacity of half of our population. It has an economic dimension as well as social implications.
In Malaysia, although Article 8 of our Constitution guarantees anti-discrimination on the basis of gender, women are still lagging especially in terms of participation in the work force and also at the level of decision-making. Malaysian female labour force participation rate has not changed for the last 20 years at about 46% and at the top most level of decision-making, there are less than 10% women in Parliament, never more than 3 women Minister at one time in the Cabinet since our Independence and constitute less than 15% of heads of departments in the civil service.
Our Employment Act for example refused to recognize the International Labour Organization standard of 90-days maternity leave, and the Government has repeatedly rejected to provide laws against sexual harassment in the workplace. But the legal system is just one of the many challenges women in Malaysia face towards achieving gender equality. Traditional chauvinistic mindsets, such as the one displayed by Ahmad Shah Md. Zin, secretary general of CUEPACS who claimed that the increase of women participation in the civil service will affect the progress of our country or UMNO MPs who make sexist remarks in Parliament, continue to make our effort towards gender equality an uphill task.
I call upon the Government to fully support the UN Working Group’s task in removing gender discrimination in Malaysia. Malaysia is a signatory to CEDAW but 15 years after that, we are still lagging behind. Unless the Government takes full responsibility now, we will waste another decade while the world moves forward in empowering women.
Chong Eng
Member of Parliament for Bukit Mertajam
DAP Wanita Chairperson