As a result, mirroring the pattern within the human rights movement overall, women's civil and political rights have eclipsed their economic and social rights. This has occurred even though abuses of economic, social and cultural rights underlie women's growing inequality and they are integrally connected to every other violation of human rights that women experience. The need to emphasize women's civil and political rights in order to break into the human rights paradigm has led to an impoverished understanding of women's right to equality, that is stripped of economic and social rights dimensions. Although the economic and social rights movement has been successful in putting specific rights such as the right to food, housing, and health on the human rights agenda, this movement has failed to consider the particularity of women's experience and consequently failed to incorporate a gender perspective into the interpretation and treatment of these rights. Programs designed to improve economic and social conditions often work best for men because they do not consider or account for the gendered character of poverty.
Women are poorer than men in every society, and they are poor for different reasons.
This discrimination places men's needs first, structures society in terms of those needs and shapes women's lives in relation to those needs. Women's poverty and economic inequality cannot be addressed unless these realities are taken into account. This version of equality, which ignores the social and economic dimensions of women's inequality, and ignores women's long-standing social and economic disadvantage, is out of date and incapable of addressing and remedying the real material inequality that women experience. Economic policy and human rights commitments are too often being treated as unrelated matters by national governments and by international financial institutions. Respecting or advancing the human rights of women is not a central goal when national budgets are constructed or national social policies, such as health care, are redesigned.