This year’s priority themes Accelerating the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls by addressing poverty and strengthening institutions and financing with a gender perspective and Review theme : Social protection systems, access to public services and sustainable infrastructure for gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls (agreed conclusions of the sixty-third session) are particularly relevant to PSI and part of our recently adopted Programme of Action.

PSI has argued that the multiple crises (economic, geopolitical, governance, environmental and care) that humanity is going through have unleashed a differentiated impact. In terms of gender consequences, the crises have exposed how the sexual division of labour in the private and public spheres persists and produces systematically unequal and patriarchal power relations, and economic structural violence, linked to intersectional discriminations and coloniality. Structural causes that influence women, feminised gender identities and gender non-conforming people result in unequal conditions and opportunities, pepertuating the cycle of feminisation of poverty.

Since the pandemic, the care crisis has revealed deep contradictions, which, if left unchanged, will continue to fuel the structural causes of women’s poverty, such as:

• The intensification of women's "traditional" unpaid care work.

• The extraction, commodification, precariousness and exploitation of women's "traditional" paid care work, including in global care chains.

• A broken or non-existent global care system with large funding gaps, targeted for outsourcing and privatisation.

• Overexposure to domestic violence, femicide and violence in the world of work.

• Intersectional layers of discrimination confront groups of women with the worst forms of life and work.

PSI will work with the Global Unions and progressive civil society organisations to advocate for a global governance approach to women’s poverty in the agreed conclusions through:

• Rebuilding the social organisation of care through the 5Rs agenda

  1. Recognise the social and economic value of care work (paid and unpaid) and the human right to care.

  2. Reward, remunerate and represent Reward, remunerate and represent care work and care workers with professionalized work, equal pay for work of equal value, adequate pensions, comprehensive social protection, healthy and safe working conditions, strong representation, full exercise of their rights to unionisation, collective bargaining and social dialogue in line with the ILO's Decent Work Agenda.

  3. Reduce the burden of women's unpaid care work.

  4. Redistribute care work within households, among all workers, eliminating the sexual division of labour, and between households and the state.

  5. Reclaim the public nature of care services and restoring the primary duty and responsibility of the state to provide public care services, to develop care systems that transform gender relations and women's lives, financing the state's investment capacity through fair and progressive taxation and ensuring equal fiscal rights of nation-states, internationally. There will be a strong focus on R2, Rewarding and remunerating care work and R5, Reclaiming the public nature of care services.

• Labour and trade union rights that transform the world of work towards greater representation of women workers in social dialogue and labour regulation bodies, transformation towards formal employment for women in their diversity without prejudice to their contractual, migratory or professional status, equal pay for work of equal value, non-discrimination, social protection, health, safety and non-violence at work; elimination of the sexual division of labour, as well as the redistribution of care work among workers.

• Just and equitable transition in articulation with environmental and gender justice.

• A gender-transformative digital new deal, including defending the publicness and universal access of the global digital commons, sovereignty of data, democratic governance and gender equality in the world of work in the digital context.

• A paradigm shift from structural adjustment, public debt and austerity to include policies on debt relief, progressive taxation, fair trade, public investment for publicly owned assets and infrastructure, and public ownership of strategic assets, unveiling gender washing strategies.

• Strengthening gender-transformative quality public services (including essential services such as health, social welfare, water, energy, and justice) and state regulation/control of private operation under explicit or hidden forms of privatisation.

• Re-foundation of the multilateral system, evidencing its co-optation by corporations that cause the bypassing of the formal and democratic processes of the UN, hidden behind the assumption of multi-stakeholder action and articulation.  Women in the international trade union movement and PSI will reclaim our role as democratic and decolonial social actors in proposals towards the global governance.