The United Nations has proved to be out of touch with women’s issues and the steps needed to bring change.

On Monday, the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women will begin its two week meeting in New York. One item on the agenda is eradicating poverty, a noble cause. The UN, unfortunately, seems to have little idea of how to go about it.

The Commission will be considering the usual parade of ineffectual platitudes, but one of the Commission’s recurring recommendations is particularly noteworthy. The public funding and delivery of social services, they say, have been the cornerstones of gender equality and poverty eradication. The agencies that deliver these services are also significant employers of women, says the UN, which warns against privatization and recommends strengthening the role of the public sector.

If strengthening the public sector would eradicate poverty, North Korea, where the public sector is everything, would be the wealthiest nation on earth instead of one of the poorest. It is no accident that women have prospered more under the conditions of the free market and limited government than the sort of command economies the UN tends to favor.

Women have shown they can compete on an equal basis with men and make it on their own, without government assistance. But even within prosperous Western countries, women find their path to advancement blocked by onerous regulations and punitive taxes. Yet the UN has not tackled these impediments to women’s progress. The only time one hears the word capitalism is in a pejorative sense.

Access to Western markets through free trade is the best way to help women in the developing world. But the benefits of free trade are missing from UN rhetoric. The United Nations should instead be called United Governments. In this sense it practices what it preaches, creating bureaucracies and talk shops on a massive scale.

The UN Commission on the Status of Women dates from 1946. Then there’s the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. One should not forget the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), and the United Nations International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW).

Precisely where one of these bodies stops and the other starts is not entirely clear and, like the rest of the UN, there would seem to be a lot of duplication and waste. The UN is a consumer, not a producer of wealth, and hardly a model of either democracy or efficiency. Neither is it an effective forum for a number of women’s issues that call for careful analysis.

You would think, for example, that the UN would objectively survey industrialized nations to determine if some of their proposals would, in fact, help or hinder women in developing nations. For example, has welfare really helped women gain independence or has it kept them in a cycle of poverty and dependence? Are government childcare programs giving women access to greater economic opportunities or forcing mothers into the workforce?

Encouraging women-owned enterprises through microcredit opportunities has been a cornerstone of the women’s empowerment philosophy in the international community. How do efforts to impose taxes, unionization, and even social security requirements on international investors threaten to hinder the burgeoning Third-World entrepreneur or fledgling free-market economy?

It is not likely that the March UN event will allow the diversity and balance necessary to explore the nuances of these issues. It is more likely that the conference will serve as a bullhorn for shopworn grievances from the usual celebrity feminist sources.

Women would be better served by ignoring the UN and instead starting a business, advocating lower taxes, and seeking to advance free markets and free trade. If it truly wants to help women, the UN should do likewise. But given that March 8 is International Women’s Day, perhaps they should start with some symbolic matters.

Women have shown themselves capable leaders of major nations such as England and India, but a woman has never headed the United Nations. Surely they can find a woman with more economic acumen than the current Secretary General, Kofi Annan, or his predecessor Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

When they do pick a woman, one can only hope that she’ll be a free-marketeer who understands that women’s liberty is best achieved through equal opportunity, and is impossible under paternalistic government and international development programs.

Examiner columnist Sally Pipes is the President and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute, a California-based think tank. She can be reached via email at spipes@pacificresearch.org.