Brussels, 8 March 2016
Press Release
The World Customs Organization (WCO) is pleased to join the international community in celebrating International Women’s Day 2016 under the theme ‘Planet 50-50 by 2030: Step It Up for Gender Equality.’
As women play a key role in international trade, the WCO recognizes the urgent need for Customs administrations to achieve gender parity by ensuring that their policies take this important issue into account, thereby further bolstering the sustainability of Customs reforms.
“The 2016 theme for International Women’s Day reminds us that it is imperative to achieve gender parity and ensure gender equality if we are to adequately address national development needs, given that women represent over 50% of the world’s population,” said WCO Secretary General Kunio Mikuriya.
“Furthermore, operational policies and procedures in Customs that are jointly devised by men and women should have a positive impact on local trading communities, considering that in many countries most cross-border traders are women,” the Secretary General added.
In his message for International Women’s Day 2016, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, “We have shattered so many glass ceilings we created a carpet of shards. Now we are sweeping away the assumptions and bias of the past so women can advance across new frontiers.”
The WCO has actively embraced gender equality, having organized a Conference in 2013 with the theme ‘Women in leadership,’ the outcomes of which were used to develop a Customs-specific diagnostic tool known as the ‘WCO Gender Equality Organizational Assessment Tool’ (GEOAT).
This tool aims at assisting Customs administrations to assess their policies, practices and activities relating to gender issues, and at making sure that gender is duly mainstreamed in the design and implementation of WCO capacity building programmes supporting Customs reform and modernization processes.
The WCO has also circulated a ‘Request for Information’ entitled ‘Gender policies for public administrations,’ in an effort to collect research papers on gender policies that would specifically target public administrations, with a view to using this information to refine the GEOAT in order to ensure that it fully meets the needs of Customs and tax administrations’ reform programmes.
‘Gender mainstreaming’ is one of the topics on the agenda of the upcoming WCO Capacity Building Meeting. In addition, the WCO Leadership and Management Development (LMD) Programme contains a full module on gender equity, which addresses gender diversity and stereotypes.
The WCO will continue to be proactive in finding ways to raise awareness on the importance of achieving gender parity within the global Customs community, thereby contributing to the creation of an equitable and more balanced working environment.