The United Nations (U.N.) Commission on the Status of Women is meeting in New York City, but there is no reason that women should take interest in the event. The status of women, after all, is better than ever, without help from the United Nations.
Women have shown that they can compete on an equal basis with men and can make it on their own without government assistance. But even within prosperous Western countries, women find their path to advancement blocked by onerous regulations, especially those that make working at home difficult, and punitive taxes. Yet the U.N. has not tackled these impediments to women’s progress. In fact, they seem to be making them worse.
Public funding and delivery of social services, U.N. officials say, has been a cornerstone of gender equality and poverty eradication. The agencies that deliver these services also employ many women, says the U.N., which warns against privatization and recommends expanding the public sector.
If expanding the public sector would eradicate poverty, North Korea, where the public sector is all encompassing, would be the wealthiest nation on earth instead of one of the poorest. It is no accident that women have prospered more under free markets and limited government than the sort of command economies that the U.N. props up. Margaret Thatcher, for example, privatized many government services, a move that provided women with better jobs in a revitalized economy.
Access to Western markets through free trade is another way to help women in developing countries. But the benefits of free trade are missing from U.N. rhetoric. The United Nations should more accurately be called the United Governments, and in this sense it practices what it preaches, creating bureaucracies and talk shops on a massive scale.
The U.N. Commission on the Status of Women dates back to 1946. Then there is the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. One should not forget the U.N. Development Fund for Women, and the U.N. International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women.
And so on. Precisely where one of these bodies stops and the other starts is not clear. Like the rest of the U.N., there is a lot of duplication and waste. The UN is a consumer, not a producer, of wealth, and it is hardly a model of democracy or efficiency. Neither is it an effective forum for a number of women’s issues.
For example, is medical research biased against women? Are women actually paid less for the same job? Has welfare truly helped women? Are women who choose to raise a family second-class citizens? And what about women in military combat? It is unlikely that the current U.N. event will allow the diversity of opinion that is necessary to properly explore these issues.
On the other hand, the U.N. does a great job at providing a forum for celebrity feminists to air their grievances against the United States, which pays most of the U.N.’s bills. Women would be better served by ignoring the UN and starting a business, working to promote lower tax rates, and seeking to advance free markets and free trade. If it truly wants to help women, then the U.N. should do likewise, but perhaps it should start with some symbolic gestures.
After all, 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. And doubtless there are many qualified women who, unlike Kurt Waldheim, U.N. boss from 1972 to 1981, have no need to hide a past as a Nazi war criminal.
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.
