Despite the fact that women's participation in the workforce has grown steadily worldwide, existing gender inequalities have intensified with respect to pay and working conditions.
Women continue to face barriers to economic empowerment and entrepreneurship.
These obstacles include discrimination in education, training, hiring, access to credit, the right to own and inherit property, lower levels of pay, promotion for equal work and greater domestic responsibilities for women. Rural women and migrant workers are particularly hard hit during times of economic downturn when they are much more vulnerable to unemployment and are often forced to carry an even larger burden of unpaid work. The Platform for Action, adopted by the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995, identified economic disparities between men and women as one of the 12 critical areas of concern requiring action by member states, the international community and civil society. During its forty-first session in 1997, the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women proposed further action and initiatives to be undertaken to promote women's economic empowerment, including the mainstreaming of a gender perspective into all economic policies and programmes. Among the agreed conclusions of the session were measures to enhance the capacity of women to influence and make economic decisions as paid workers, managers, employers, elected officials, members of non-governmental organizations and unions, producers, household managers and consumers.