Accelerating Efforts to Achieve Women's Economic Empowerment

A/HRC/RES/59/18View PDF

Who created this mandate?

A document of the Human Rights Council, under agenda item 3Promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to development, published in 2025.

Who cites this mandate in the budget?

1 entity

Extracted automatically from each entity’s budget submission.

What subjects does this mandate have?

10 topics

Anti-Discrimination Measures Economic Conditions Economic Policy Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Empowerment Gender Mainstreaming Social Policy Trade Agreements Women's Education Women's Rights

What does this mandate say?

32 operative paragraphs

Stresses that the realization of women’s and girls’ equal enjoyment of human rights relevant to their economic empowerment is crucial to achieving all Sustainable Development Goals, in particular Goals 5, 8 and 10 for increasing the agency and autonomy of women, as well as of girls in accordance with their age and maturity, and their full, equal and meaningful participation in society;

Reaffirms that the right to education is a multiplier right that enables the agency and autonomy of women, as well as of girls in accordance with their age and maturity, and specifically their right to take part in the conduct of public affairs as well as in economic, social and cultural life, and to fully, equally and meaningfully participate in the decision-making processes that shape society;

Urges all States to take effective action to remove barriers to women’s economic empowerment by:

Reviewing, repealing and eliminating laws, policies and practices that negatively affect the human rights of all women relevant to their economic empowerment, including discriminatory laws, policies, practices or customs, in accordance with international human rights obligations;

Ensuring women’s full autonomy in economic decision-making, by ensuring equal rights and eliminating all forms of de jure and de facto economic discrimination, including with regard to access to ownership and control over productive resources, legal capacity, pay, taxation, economic and social models, and regulations and practices that subordinate women as economic actors;

Providing full and equal access to formal financial services, financial resources and financial products for all women throughout the course of their lives;

Enacting or strengthening and enforcing laws and regulations or other appropriate measures that uphold the principle of equal pay for work of equal value in the public and private sectors as a critical measure to eliminate the gender pay and pension gap;

Ensuring that women living in rural, remote and maritime areas have equal access to ownership, use of and management of land and natural resources, and to equal or priority treatment in land and agrarian reform and in land resettlement schemes, and supporting their integration into sustainable value chains by improving access to digital infrastructure, market information and financial tools;

Pursuing, by effective means, policies of preventing and eliminating gender-based violence and harassment in public and private spaces, whether online or offline, with an emphasis on effective legal, preventive and protective measures, including raising awareness regarding the rights of women who are victims of or at risk of gender-based violence, including harassment in the world of work and in the household;

Ensuring access to justice and accountability mechanisms and timely and effective remedies for the effective implementation and enforcement of laws aimed at preventing and eliminating all forms of discrimination, including by informing women and girls about their rights under relevant laws in an accessible way and by improving legal infrastructure, inter alia by training justice practitioners to carry out their responsibilities in a non-discriminatory manner, to ensure equality before the law and equal protection of women and girls by the law;

Increasing investment in care and support policies and infrastructure to provide universal access to affordable and quality services for all, including childcare, and health and support services for persons with disabilities and older persons, and expanding access to paid maternity, paternity and parental leave and social protection for all workers, including both for informal workers and for those in non-standard forms of employment;

Promoting the progressive realization of the right of girls to education by providing them with access to at least 12 years of quality education, by implementing appropriate measures;

Calls upon States to accelerate efforts to achieve women’s economic empowerment by:

Promoting the full, equal and meaningful participation and consultation of women, and of girls in accordance with their age and maturity, in the design, preparation and implementation of economic and social laws and policies at the local and national levels, and promoting gender equality in decision-making bodies and women’s economic leadership, including through women’s equal representation in legislative, executive and judicial bodies, trade unions and employers’ organizations;

Ensuring that all development strategies are gender-responsive and fully respect human rights, including the right to development, have a particular focus on the poorest and those furthest behind and in vulnerable situations, especially women and girls living in or at risk of poverty, and work towards ending the structural barriers to women’s and girls’ access to economic resources;

Taking concrete steps to support gender-responsive budgeting, to address gaps in resourcing for gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls and to ensure investments in this regard;

Establishing or strengthening comprehensive and universal social protection systems, including floors, that integrate a gender perspective to ensure equal access to social protection for all women, including those living in poverty, without discrimination of any kind, and taking measures to progressively achieve higher levels of protection, including for those working in the informal economy, by facilitating the transition from informal to formal work;

Expanding, in accordance with domestic legislation and policies, the reach of sustainable pension schemes, including but not limited to strategies such as social pensions, and increasing their benefits, with a view to ensuring income security in old age, and by expanding non-contributory pension schemes to cover older women, particularly those who have engaged in informal or unpaid care work and domestic work throughout their lives;

Promoting the implementation of equal pay policies through, for example, social dialogue, collective bargaining, objective appraisals and gender-neutral job evaluations, awareness-raising campaigns, promoting shared parental leave between parents, pay analysis and transparency, and gender pay audits, as well as certification and review of pay practices and working conditions and the increased availability of data disaggregated by sex and analysis of the gender pay gap;

Developing and promoting financial literacy and financial education programmes for women and girls, in order to ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to have access to financial services and financial products, in particular women working in rural areas and those leading and working in micro, small and medium-sized enterprises;

Creating a climate that is conducive to increasing the number of women entrepreneurs and the size of their businesses by providing them with training and advisory services in business, administration, information and communications technology and financial services and by facilitating networking and information-sharing by providing them with training and advisory services in business, administration and digital skills – including in e-commerce and financial technology – and by facilitating mentorship networks, market access and capacity to meet sustainability-linked trade requirements;

Mobilizing and allocating resources to develop and implement policies and programmes to support women’s entrepreneurship and new opportunities for women entrepreneurs, which will lead to business expansion for existing women-owned microenterprises and small and medium-sized enterprises, and ensuring that emerging environmental and trade-related measures are inclusive and do not disproportionately affect them;

Promoting a work-life balance and the equal sharing of responsibilities within the household and measures to recognize, reduce, redistribute and value unpaid care, support and domestic work, as well as the proper recognition, representation, remuneration and reward of care workers;

Eliminating gender stereotypes from all educational processes, practices and teaching materials, including through the periodic review and updating of school curricula, textbooks, programmes and teaching methods, and the inclusion of human rights education for educators and students, including on gender equality and non-discrimination, as part of the mandatory school curriculum, and ensuring that all girls are encouraged to freely choose their fields of study;

Conducting or encouraging further women-led research about the impact of structural adjustments, taxation, debt, macroeconomic policies and trade and investment agreements on human rights and gender equality, and improving the situation of women and girls living in poverty;

Encourages States to support women’s and girls’ access to skills development, technical and vocational education and training relevant to the demands of the labour market, as well as lifelong learning opportunities, inter alia by expanding the scope of education and training opportunities ranging from basic digital fluency to advanced technical skills in science, technology, engineering and mathematics and in information and communications technology, by closing the digital gender divide and by promoting their full, equal and meaningful participation in emerging fields such as artificial intelligence, the green economy and the digital transition, while addressing the barriers to women’s and girls’ equal and safe access to online spaces, so as not to leave them further behind and also promoting a lifelong-learning approach to support and empower women to return to work after periods of care leave;

Recalls the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, and urges the private sector to examine its workplace culture and environment, as well as its recruitment, promotion, retention and termination practices, and to assess its service delivery, as a means to overcome gender stereotypes and negative social norms in all spheres of life, to address inequalities and to take the measures necessary to ensure that the private sector, both as employers and service providers, are held accountable when they fail to abide by laws and regulations;

Recognizes the right of persons with disabilities, including women with disabilities, to work, on an equal basis with others, including the right to the opportunity to gain a living by work freely chosen or accepted in a labour market and work environment that is open, inclusive and accessible to persons with disabilities, in line with articles 5 and 27 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and calls upon States to develop comprehensive social protection systems covering disability-related extra costs and ensuring access to, for example, non-contributory cash transfer schemes, to empower persons with disabilities when choosing their support services;

Reaffirms the important role of civil society actors and organizations, trade unions and national human rights institutions for women’s economic empowerment;

Encourages States to strengthen the collection and use of more and better disaggregated data and to use such data to inform evidence-based, gender-responsive budgeting and policymaking processes to identify and address gaps in funding, equal opportunities, and barriers to women’s economic empowerment and women’s full, equal and meaningful participation and leadership in decision-making processes in employment, whether formal or informal;

Requests the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to prepare a report on trade agreements, including their gender equality provisions, and their impact on women’s economic empowerment, in consultation with States and all relevant stakeholders, including the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, the International Labour Organization, the World Trade Organization, the United Nations Children’s Fund, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and other relevant United Nations agencies, funds and programmes, relevant special procedures of the Human Rights Council, regional organizations and human rights bodies and civil society, including women’s and children’s rights organizations, and to present the report to the Human Rights Council at its sixty-fifth session;

Decides to remain seized of the matter.

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