During his presentation Monday at the Casa de Nariño, the president stated that it is a priority for his government to move forward to overcome problems such as wage inequality in the public and private sectors, and discrimination against women.
Petro noted that his administration’s gender equality policy seeks to prevent cases such as that of “Diana Navarro, a transgender woman and African, who was discriminated against for being African-American, discriminated against for being trans, discriminated against for being a woman.”
The program will be composed of women inspectors, including indigenous, African, transgender, elderly and young people, and its mission is to correct gender inequality in the world of work in Colombia.
They will be present in 32 provinces of the country, knowledgeable about labor rights issues and taking into account the gender approach and women’s rights, from a regional, ethnic and intersectional perspective.
Starting next December 1, inspection pilots considering economic sectors that are most feminized or those in which patriarchal and patriarchal practices have been identified against women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people will begin.
These mechanisms will be developed in companies, public agencies and informal workplaces.
Petro stressed that this initiative came as a result of “a proposal presented in the electoral campaign related to transforming the Ministry of Labor into reality from a female perspective.”
He pointed to serious gender equality problems occurring in the world of work, such as inequality in wages between men and women.
The head of state stressed that “in the campaign we found, and proposed it, that the state should do something to reduce the social disparity in terms of wages between women and men.”
He explained that according to official statistics, in an equal position, “women earn a salary 30 percent less than that of a man.”
He added that more than 60 percent of the property titles granted by the state in rural areas are men, which means that we “discriminate against women” even in advanced policies such as land reform.
He stressed that the goal is to make the elite group grow throughout the country and take into account its recommendations for the adoption of public policies for gender equality.
“There will be hundreds of women, maybe thousands of women trained to articulate the inequality of work between women in the world of the informal economy and the formal economy. And not just hear them and discover them, but control them with the legal tools we have. If you had to build another law, The law must be amended.”
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