Moving from Formal to Substantive Equality
Transformative Equality
CEDAW General Recommendation No. 25 (2004):
“The lives of women and men must be considered in a contextual way, and measures adopted towards a real transformation of opportunities, institutions and systems so that they are no longer grounded in historically determined male paradigms of power and life patterns. The position of women will not be improved as long as the underlying causes of discrimination against women, and of their inequality, are not effectively addressed.”
Anticipating the solutions to be further explored by the Gathering’s participants during the strategic planning the next day, Dr. Biholar challenged the Group to move even beyond notions of substantive equality, to strive for a holistic, sustainable, and most importantly,
transformative equality that disrupts underlying social beliefs and institutional structures.
She concluded by stressing that the systemic change necessary for transformative equality must be achieved through all branches of the state at all levels – in collaboration with civil society organizations and rights holders, or ordinary people in their everyday lives.
The guarantee of identical treatment
of women and men is not sufficient
to achieve equality for women.
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Real enjoyment of equality is achieved not only by removing formal barriers. It is achieved when social and cultural structures and power relations that perpetuate models of subordination-domination of sexes are modified.
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Ramona Biholar, in “Challenging the Barriers to Real Equality: Transformative Equality,” available on the ParlAmericas website
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States Parties shall take all appropriate measures:
To modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women, with a view to achieving the elimination of prejudices and customary and all other practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority or the superiority of either of the sexes or on stereotyped roles for men and women