Amina Mohammed had been widely tipped to become UN deputy secretary general. Photograph: Afolabi Sotunde/Reuters

António Guterres appoints Nigeria’s Amina Mohammed as his Deputy after saying gender parity at UN was a priority.

Agence France-Presse in New York - 15 December 2016

The incoming UN secretary general, António Guterres, has announced that Nigeria’s environment minister, Amina Mohammed, will be his deputy and appointed two other women to key leadership posts.

Guterres has made achieving gender parity at the world body a priority of his tenure, which begins on 1 January. Women currently fill less than one in four leadership positions at the UN.

Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti, a senior Brazilian foreign ministry official, will serve as Guterres’s chief of staff, and Kyung-wha Kang of South Korea has been appointed to the new position of special adviser on policy.

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Walk Free Foundation

THE GLOBAL SLAVERY INDEX 2016 provides a map, country by country, of the estimated prevalence of modern slavery, together with information about the steps each government has taken to respond to this issue. This information allows an objective comparison and assessment of both the problem and adequacy of the response in 167 countries.

Direct Link to Full 216-Page 2016 Report:

http://assets.globalslaveryindex.org/downloads/Global+Slavery+Index+2016.pdf

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ILO – International Labour Organization – Gender, Equality & Diversity Branch

The care economy has enormous potential for employment generation in the coming years. Changing demographics and gender roles mean that finding solutions to care work is essential if women are to truly have equal opportunities in the world of work. As such, promoting decent care jobs has become an important area for ILO work. Care work needs to be measured, recognized, and valued.

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What Lies Behind Gender Wage Gaps: A Review of the Literature

Human capital explanations of pay gaps, developed by Becker (1964) and Mincer (1974), focus on education and accumulated work experience. These suggest that women have different educational backgrounds or attainment levels from men, and are more likely to have career interruption(s) that lead to lower levels of accumulated work experience. Empirical studies provide evidence that differences in human capital represent a significant part of the wage differential between men and women.

However, as gaps in education between men and women have narrowed, particularly in more developed economies, so has the explanatory power of education in explaining the remaining gap (World Bank, 2012). Indeed, in 43 out of 53 countries,* after controlling for individual characteristics and place of residence, differences in education between men and women are very small or have even reversed, such that women have higher levels of education than men. In these cases, education not only fails to explain the observed gap but, when taken into account, actually increases the unexplained gap. The notion that educational differences fail to explain completely the differences in pay between men and women has redirected the focus. Instead of focusing on the differences in the number of years of schooling (or degrees attained), a newer stream of research explains wage differentials by the fact that men and women tend to specialize in different fields of education (Machin and Puhani, 2003).

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Fact sheet
Updated December 2016

Key facts

• An estimated 225 million women in developing countries would like to delay or stop childbearing but are not using any method of contraception.

• Some family planning methods, such as condoms, help prevent the transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.

• Family planning / contraception reduces the need for abortion, especially unsafe abortion.

• Family planning reinforces people’s rights to determine the number and spacing of their children.

• By preventing unintended pregnancy, family planning /contraception prevents deaths of mothers and children.

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