IBL Panel Looks at CEDAW and Closing the Gender Gap on Wealth, Property

With Women’s History Month now underway, an International Business Law panel discussion Monday night provided a well-timed look at the ability of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which has been the leading international treaty on the rights of women for more than 40 years, to help women achieve financial equity.  

The focus of the discussion was a new work by featured speaker, José E. Alvarez, Herbert and Rose Rubin Professor of International Law, NYU Law School, who coauthored Women's Property Rights Under CEDAW (Oxford University Press, May 2024), with Judith Bauder, a researcher at the European University Institute. The book focuses on how and to what extent CEDAW has been generating jurisprudence to close the gender gap on wealth and property.  

The panelists, who brought a wide range of scholarly backgrounds to the table, included our own 1901 Distinguished Research Professor of Law Marsha Garrison, with expertise on policies related to families, children, reproductive technology, and medical decision making; Professor Darren Rosenblum of McGill University’s Faculty of Law, whose research focuses on corporate governance, particularly diversity initiatives and remedies for sex inequality; and Professor Eleanor Brown of Fordham Law, whose legal scholarship is focused on property, migration, globalization, development, and race and the law. 

In his opening remarks, Alvarez said that the research for the book revealed that the global gender gap with respect to wealth and property is, not surprisingly, really a chasm. 
 
“You can measure this by who has access to credit, who owns businesses, and who owns farmland,” Alvarez said. “Despite the fact that women produce a good chunk of the [agricultural output] of farmland, they don’t seem to own it. And when they do own it, they are stuck with very small farms because they do not obtain the credit they need to expand their businesses.... They’re also stuck with low-paying jobs, unpaid work, as in the home, or with respect to being caretakers in the informal [employment] sector.” 

These issues have actually grown worse in recent years, amid the COVID pandemic and climate change, he added. The World Bank’s efforts to get more land titles into the hands of women, while important to leveling the playing field in property rights, have been stymied in countries that either formally restrict women from accessing and owning land, or inhibit women from having access to land through cultural customs, such as not allowing widows equal inheritance rights when they lose their spouse, and instead permitting male relatives to swoop in and obtain ownership of property and inheritance.  

“One of the reasons for the book actually, is that there was relatively little literature in the international human rights space about this particular right,” Alvarez said. The research he and Bauder conducted points to the need for laws that are not just general in regard to equality for women but that “favor women and address specific structural features that prevent them from attaining substantive equality,” he said. Alvarez also pointed out that the book covers the many criticisms of CEDAW, including that it is overly deferential to states and that its male standard should not be the standard of equality, among others.  

Panelists weighed in with their own commentary about the book and CEDAW. Garrison noted that the authors did a “fantastic job of putting together a very large body of CEDAW jurisprudence, making it understandable and describing its nuances.”. “I also want to compliment the authors on dealing so well with the criticisms of CEDAW and showing where they ring true and where, more often, they fail to provide the kind of nuance that we need.” 

But Garrison also questioned “whether it's fair look at CEDAW through a property lens,” because as the authors themselves point out, CEDAW rarely relies on a property framework to end discrimination against women. Beyond that, though, the overriding problem she sees with CEDAW is that, as with other United Nations conventions, it lacks an enforcement mechanism and states frequently fail to comply with its findings. “These are shame and blame regimes and the evidence is very thin that they actually have a lot of impact,” Garrison said.  

Rosenblum, who wrote a 2008 critique of CEDAW, asserting that it did not properly address the cause of discrimination against women, which is really based more broadly upon gender, said that criticism still stands. “Its focus on the binary was fundamentally problematic, both as a matter of fact and as a strategic matter, in excluding the people who have the power to make change, which is men,” Rosenblum said. “I still feel that way.” 

Still, they gave praise to Alvarez for the book’s focus. “I actually see a remedy, as you do José in CEDAW, and in thinking about property rights as a legitimate form of recourse,” Rosenblum said. “One of the problems, I think, genuinely speaking on the left, is a focus on identity-driven rights that are about discrimination rather than the distributive effects of discrimination. And property, as you know, is a particularly salient, if not the most salient, piece of inequality out there.” 

As a scholar of property and migration, Brown said, she considers the importance of women’s ability to access cash and their ability to work as the key to achieving gender equality in developing countries.  

“The fundamental problem, which I believe CEDAW does more to address than any previous framework, but still not enough, is that for poor women in developing countries, what they have is labor,” Brown said. But because these women don’t perceive the value of their labor contributions to be as high as they are, women tend to be shortchanged and in turn shortchange themselves within their households.  

“How do we come up with a framework that can deal with that fundamental problem?” Brown asked. “The question I always ask is, if a woman wants to leave, what is her capability to leave?” 

The event was sponsored by the Dennis J. Block Center for the Study of International Business Law. President and Joseph Crea Dean David D. Meyer and Professor Stratos Pahis, co-director of the Block Center, introduced the speaker and panelists. They were joined at the pre-panel reception and subsequent discussion by Block Center co-directors Professor Robin Effron and Professor Irene Ten Cate.  

Photos from the event are here.