HÀ NỘI — Experts discussed the importance of gender equality in the Law on State Budget during a conference held on Tuesday in Hà Nội.
The conference, jointly organised by the National Assembly’s Committee for Social Affairs and the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and Empowerment of Women (UN Women), attracted the participation of more than 70 members of provincial and municipal people’s councils and concerned organisations.
The conference aimed at improving the responsibility of State management organisations in including gender affairs in budget work, and all socio-economic development programmes will urge a focus on gender equality and women’s progress.
Vũ Phương Ly, an expert from UN Women, said international experience showed that a gender-responsive budget was an effective method to resolve gender inequality, thus it had been implemented in different countries around the world over the past 30 years.
In the Asia-Pacific region, many countries had strongly committed to enhancing their gender-responsive budget such as Australia, South Korea, Bhutan, India and Nepal.
Deputy chairwoman of the Committee for Social Affairs Lê Thị Nguyệt said that in Việt Nam, the National Assembly approved the Law on Gender Equality in 2006, and defined basic principles on gender equality, including inserting gender equality into the compilation and implementation of policies and laws.
The Law on State Budget in 2015 included gender equality in State budget management, and gender equality became a foundation to set annual estimates for the State budget.
Nguyệt said including gender equality into the Law on State Budget in 2015 was an important basis to meet the nation’s equality targets.
Agreeing with Nguyệt, Elisa Fernandez, head of the UN Women Vietnam Office, said a gender-responsive budget was one of the most important norms of Sustainable Development Goal No 5 on gender equality and women empowerment.
UN Women has supported more than 80 countries around the world on gender-responsive budgets, including Việt Nam.
Speaking at the conference, representatives believed that the implementation of gender equality in Việt Nam had achieved good results.
The rate of female National Assembly deputies is increasing, and the rate of women taking part in work has reached 48.4 per cent of the total workforce.
However, on average, women’s incomes are lower than men’s.
In many families, women must do housework.
Several social welfare policies mentioned gender equality, however, while being conducted, the target of gender equality was not done well.
The experts proposed to better analyse gender equality in setting up annual budget estimates and in a number of state management policies. — VNS