Top of the G7 agenda? Gender equality, of course
by Andrew Tettenborn, TCW:
We are resigned these days to having well-paid jet-setters with grandiose titles from the UN and the Council of Europe buzzing around like bluebottles, telling us and our weary officials what we need to be doing about Grenfell, or the bedroom tax, or equality, or whatever. One of the advantages of the G7 is that it is different from these organisations; we have here a less pious and more informal grouping that concentrates on the business in hand and gets things done for the world economy.
[…] There is plenty to talk about at the G7: Trump’s tariffs, Iran sanctions, North Korea, Islamic extremism, the transformation of employment; the list goes on. Although no doubt an academic thesis might plausibly connect any or all of these with women’s social and economic equality, gender parity is unlikely to provide the kind of immediate answer to what course of action is necessary that delegates can take away and sell to their governments and people. Time at this sort of conference is not unlimited. Yet, without a hint of irony, ‘experts’ (ie members of the Council) have demanded that talks about US tariffs cannot be allowed to overshadow the all-important discussions about women’s empowerment. Anyone looking at this other than through thick gender equality lenses might be forgiven for thinking that if we have a limited time to solve immediate problems, devoting hours of it to toe-curlingly dreary sermons from ineffably dreary people on gender equality (including, incidentally, equality of two-spirit and intersex people, whether men or women), is a curious way to use it.
It gets worse. The Council’s recommendations for Canada’s presidency, available here, make interesting reading. We can put aside some of the wackier assertions (I particularly like the throwaway line that ‘gender equality is the number one predictor of peace’) and the stuff that could have been written by a machine even though probably penned by a professor (‘We call for actions that recognize the diversity of girls and women, target multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination and disadvantage, stop the roll back of women’s rights, and leave no one behind’). The Council is demanding that the G7 under its tutelage require all sorts of commitments as to national foreign and social policy which ought to be left up to states and their electorates. On foreign policy, for example, not only must 0.7 per cent of all income go on foreign aid, but 20 per cent of that must be hypothecated to women’s groups; 50 per cent of funding to conflict-affected countries must go to women, peace and security activities; and (this could have come out of an Ealing comedy) gender advisers are to be integrated into the operational planning processes for all military forces.
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