UN aims to achieve wage parity for women by 2030
By TIOL News Service
PARIS, SEPT 19, 2017: IN a bid to to raise up women's pay across the world to equal men's, a new global partnership, the Equal Pay International Coalition (EPIC) – which includes the United Nations labour agency and Organization's entity promotion of women's rights – launched yesterday.
Convened by the ILO, UN Women and the OECD, a diverse set of actors are being brought together at the global, regional and national levels to support governments, employers and workers and their organizations, and other stakeholders, to make equal pay between women and men for work of equal value a reality.
With the launch of EPIC at the UN headquarters in New York, work will begin to support innovative and effective equal pay policies and practices. Peer-to-peer policy exchanges, knowledge sharing, peer-reviewed research and robust data and statistics will be priority areas as the Coalition moves forward initially.
Employers and trade unions, as well as other key stakeholders, will have a central role in the application and rolling out of equal pay policies. A Platform of Champions, launched earlier this year by UN Women at the Commission on the Status of Women, will also contribute to strengthening advocacy on equal pay, as part of EPIC.
EPIC is a direct move to achieve the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), in particular Target 8.5 which calls for equal pay for work of equal value by 2030. A recent ILO-Gallup report, based on a representative survey of 142 countries, shows that women and men alike want women to be in paid jobs, but there remain a range of challenges for women at work, including unequal pay, balancing work and family responsibilities, lack of access to affordable care, and unfair treatment.
The issue of equal pay remains high on the UN's agenda. This year, the UN Secretary-General's High-level Panel for Women's Economic Empowerment, released a report that focused on transformative actions needed to advance women's economic empowerment, highlighting the importance of equal pay for work of equal value. The innovative work of the newly created EPIC will contribute significantly to challenging some of the main assumptions reinforcing unequal pay, which were also highlighted by the High-Level Panel and the ILO-Gallup report.