Campaign underway to promote gender equality in workplaces
A campaign called “Career has no gender” has been launched to promote gender equality in workplaces nationwide, Le Thanh Hang, Director of the Vietnam Business Coalition for Women’s Empowerment (VBCWE), said on October 20.
This is the first-ever comprehensive and systematic campaign on gender equality at the workplace and women’s economic empowerment in Vietnam, she noted.
A range of activities are to take place, including seminars and political consultations.
According to Oxfam, an international confederation of 20 NGOs working with partners in over 90 countries and territories to end the injustices that cause poverty, gender inequality is one of the oldest and most pervasive forms of inequality in the world. It denies women their voice, devalues their work, and makes their position unequal to men’s, from the household to the national and global levels.
Despite important progress made over recent years, in no country have women achieved economic equality with men and they are still more likely than men to live in poverty.
Women do the lowest-paid work around the world. Globally, they earn 24% less than men, and at the current rate of progress it will take 170 years to close the gap. Seven-hundred million fewer women than men are in paid work.
Struggling to eliminate gender inequality, Vietnam fell 10 places to 87th in the 2019 global rankings.
With an average score of 0.7 on a scale of 1, it has made little progress towards gender equality, according to the 2019 Global Gender Gap Report released by the World Economic Forum.
The campaign is therefore expected to raise awareness among employers and the general public about gender equality.
The VBCWE was launched in February 2018 through the Investing in Women (IW) programme funded by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), for the purpose of pursuing gender equality at the workplace and women’s economic empowerment in Vietnam.
