Monday, 14:00 17/03/2014
National strategy on gender equality shows signs of success
Deputy chairman of HCM City People`s Committee Hua Ngoc Thuan has urged the relevant bodies to bolster efforts towards gender quality.
Reviewing the five-year national strategy on gender equality which began in HCM City in 2011, Thuan said that the city's programme on women's rights in the workplace was having a positive impact at senior management level.
The gender equality laws are being propagated and implemented widely through different social programmes, Thuan said, and the city is seeing proof of this.
For instance, the number of women sitting on the party's committee in wards, communes and towns has exceeded targets set prior to the initiative.
The city has also helped enterprises' attract more women to roles, and in rural areas, vocational training programmes have been set up to improve women's earning potential. Over the last three years the number of rural women receiving vocational training in across the 12 districts is 6,674 and 454,820 women have found work. This exceeds the targets set for 2015.
Health care programmes for female workers in industrial and export processing zones have also been improved.
One of the results is that the gender imbalance at birth has reduced, and less women are opting to terminate female fetuses. However, setting long-term targets on the gender imbalance at birth is unrealistic due to issues such as the increase of immigrants arriving in the city, according to the city's report on the national strategy on gender equality.
The report also showed reductions in incidences of domestic violence over the past three years. However women still accounted for 92.5 per cent of domestic violence victims.
