Enabling conditions for large-scale transformations with respect to the environment and gender need to be created. Large-scale socio-economic structures and policies have both positive and negative effects on the environment and on gender equality. Leveraging positive effects while minimizing negative ones is challenging, but can provide opportunities to create enabling environments in which social equality, inclusiveness and well-being are combined with environmental sustainability. It is essential to develop policies that prioritize social well-being over individual and short-term economic gains.
Issues of unpaid work and time poverty need to be addressed. Both women and men perform “care economy” functions. Women’s share of such work is usually larger and is often unrecognized, encompassing not only child rearing and home care but also invisible production activities. Recognizing the contributions of people who take care of families and communities, as well as those who perform subsistence agricultural and other work, would make it possible to account more fully for the value of this work; to address time poverty issues; to increase capacities to redistribute paid and unpaid work within households, among households, and between households and governments; and thus to consider the care economy and unpaid work in initiatives aimed at achieving sustainable development and gender justice.
Women Men
12% 88%
Source: IUCN (2015)
Figure 4.2: Heads of national environmental sector ministries in UN Member States (women and men) in 2015
