Position Paper

Delegate of Estonia
Estonia proudly proclaims itself to be one of the most gender inclusive societies in the
world today, with a governmental system where over half of all jobs in leadership
positions are occupied by women. Both our president, and our prime minister are women,
which is a historic achievement at the global level, making us the first and only country to
be so.

For the inclusion of women, from a legal and policy perspective, Estonia is one of the
countries that arrived very early at the table. Post our ratification of international
conventions necessary for our integration with the European Union, we have instituted
legislations such as the Gender Equality Act in 2004, that, along with our constitution
Article 12, make clear the rights of women as being on the same plane as men, and
emphasise on institutional action necessary to bring both these parties to the same level
playing field.

By calling this entire intervention gender mainstreaming, we engaged in initiatives right

from the early 2000s. An example for this would be a project instituted by the Ministry of
Social Affairs that tried to use a dual-track approach to achieve equality, and improve
awareness of what exactly gender equality was and why it was necessary. We also refer
to gender impact assessment tools in order to promote mainstreaming. While we are yet
to legislate and develop a national level plan to implement gender equality, we do have
numerous specific policies geared to specific gender related issues that we attempt to
resolve. An example of this would be our efforts to bridge the gender pay gap, an
initiative that few to none countries at the global scale have taken any efforts to do. Some
other policy initiatives were the Strategy for Preventing Violence, Strategy of Children and
Families, the Estonian Welfare Development Plan, etc.
One manner in which, at the domestic level, Estonian law is unique, is by the inclusion of
the terms equality and specific references to equal treatment in all of our legislations,
irrespective of whether they directly affect the stakeholder. We try to bring in the gender
perspective as constantly as possible, and this has automatically improved the rates of
awareness of these issues and normalise the equal treatment.

Estonia is a member of the European Union and at the EU level, a lot of our projects
receive funding from this international collaboration. Within our nation we have
established a Gender Equality and Equal Treatment Centre for the use of Cohesion Policy
Funding - an institution geared toward the responsible administration of the structural
funds we receive from the EU, which we try to utilise in the most efficient way possible.
Furthermore, an EEA grant was provided to this body, which was used to develop a
method to identify and measure equality, and distribute this across differing parameters.
It is considered to be a very unique and broad range of indicators that were implemented
in order to identify the differentials in society from a gendered eyepiece.

In 2017, we also set up a Women's Association within parliament, which allows members
of parliament to focus on specific gender related issues, and take action to support the
interests of various groups.

At the UN Level, Estonia is a proud member nation of the United Nations Commission on
the Status of Women, and has ratified all relevant international conventions. From our
position as a nation belonging to the developed demographic, along with all of the
discussions conducted by us to facilitate and further policy and institutional inclusion of
women, we believe we would be an important contributor to this particular conference.

Our first order of the day is to recognise and impress upon fellow committee members the
fact that there exists a social and cultural perspective entrenched in patriarchal notions
that make it a complicated issue to legislate toward eradicating. To that regard, our
solutions, and essentially our entire worldview in thsi particular committee sets itself
across a two-angled perspective.

Before discussing this angle in and of itself, there is a particular illustration the delegate
would like to refer to. This illustration is essentially that it is absolutely impossible to
adopt a classicalist approach to this committee, i.e. that the forces of demand and supply
alone cannot be used for policy legislation as the cultural and social factors sometimes
affect the functioning of this. An example for this would be subsidising education. While
the primary reasoning behind such a subsidy is essentially a simple one - that by reducing
the price of education, you are boosting demand, it more often than not, does not
translate into the desired result.
The first angle within our proposed solution and any document Estonia shall be
contributing toward, is with respect to structural changes instituted to ensure economic
development that would indirectly support women. The second angle is with the
institution of gender specific law. The delegate would like to impress that this is a very
niche and complicated arrangement. If the institution of gender specific law requires a
top-to-bottom restructuring of the system, the effectiveness of the same cannot be
gauged, and might result in a negative impact on economic development. At the same
time, the pace at which economic development improves gender equality is not as fast as
is desired. The delegate believes that a mixture of policies geared towards both would be
the most efficient way at ensuring equality.