Equality for women with disabilities
AGILE.CH joins the women's strike and calls for real equality that includes women with disabilities. The perspective of disability is far too often missing in measures for gender equality. Agile advocates double equality: equal rights and self-determination for women with disabilities.
The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD) recognizes that specific measures for the Equality of women with disabilities are necessary. A separate article is dedicated to women (Art. 6), and gender aspects are included in several other articles as a cross-cutting issue. The UN CRPD came into force in Switzerland around five years ago and is binding. The extent to which it has contributed to improving the lives of the 985,000 women and girls with disabilities in Switzerland should now finally be examined.
On June 14, women with disabilities will raise their voices in various places in Switzerland because they finally want to be heard and seen. They are taking up the Women's strike demands, including the following three points:
- We want "women's professions" to be upgraded and appropriately remunerated. We want social insurance that secures our livelihood. Social insurance insures the salary, not the work. Low wages in "women's professions" and part-time work lead to lower IV pensions for women.
- We call for a national prevention plan to combat violence, which also implements the Istanbul Convention.
- The needs of women with disabilities must always be taken into account when designing gender concepts and activities. For example, the fact that information about victim support at www.opferhilfe-schweiz.ch is also translated into sign language is encouraging. May many agencies and institutions follow this example!
Thoughts from two women with disabilities on equality
"For me, double equality means that I am taken seriously and valued as a woman with disabilities. I experience this in my job as the only teacher of business and law in our faculty and as the only person with disabilities in the entire faculty. That's how it should be! It's a shame that we still have to discuss such a matter of course." Simone Leuenberger is a secondary school teacher and lives with a muscle disease.
"As a young woman, I worked part-time in a low-paid job with the confidence that I would earn more later on. And then I fell ill. As I hadn't earned very much until then, my half IV pension is now correspondingly small. It doesn't matter for the calculation of the IV pension that I would certainly have earned more. The career supplement is only available for survivors' pensions, not for IV pensions. For me, equality means that women with typical female jobs and part-time work should also receive social insurance benefits that they can live on. " Anita Wymann, administration employee at AGILE.CH, lives with MS.
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