How Modern Trade Deals Fail Women 

The United Nations Human Rights Council has been assigned to prepare a report to be published in 2027 on trade agreements, including their gender equality provisions, and their impact on women’s economic empowerment. To further develop this report, the Council and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights have asked for contributions to this report. 

The WIDE+ Gender and Trade Working Group has been involved in providing feedback through the submission of the Gender and Trade Coalition. In addition, the new Working Group members, Silke Trommer and Adrienne Roberts, have, together with Izabella Vergara Arenas, written a submission. This blog post, written by WIDE+ volunteer Felicia Văduva, summarises the main conclusions about the contributions.

Trade Acts on Gender, But Does Not Transform It

Trade governance has paid visible attention to gender over the last decade through new working groups and cooperation clauses at the WTO, UNCTAD, and the International Trade Centre. However, this model includes women without restructuring the system around them. It funds empowerment initiatives while leaving the enforceable core of trade law untouched. 

This, while over 20% of active trade agreements now mention gender, the Gender and Trade Coalition (GTC) – a network of over 300 feminist civil society organisations – shows that free trade has simultaneously created more jobs for women and more exploitation, occupational segregation, and unpaid care burdens. In trade agreements, women’s economic empowerment is generally measured by market access, ignoring the unpaid care and informal labour which, the majority of the time, is performed by women. 

What is Equal Economic Citizenship?

Researchers at Universidad de los Andes and the University of Manchester recently proposed a standard called “equal economic citizenship” to the UN Human Rights Council. The concept is simple: people should be able to participate in economic life as equals, with their social rights just as legally enforceable as the commercial rights currently guaranteed to foreign investors and corporations. This should not be treated as a favour, but as a baseline. This means targeting the parts of trade law that carry actual consequences – like investment, intellectual property, digital trade, and services – rather than leaving gender as an unenforceable side issue.

Conclusions 

To move from symbolic inclusion to genuine economic empowerment, states and multilateral institutions must transition from market-integration initiatives to a transformative framework that writes binding gender and human rights protections directly into the core, enforceable chapters of trade agreements. 

And achieving equal economic citizenship requires that feminist civil society groups are active decision-makers in trade negotiations, that states retain the policy space to subsidise sectors where women predominate, and that we recognise and redistribute care responsibilities through robust public infrastructure rather than treating them as private, individual burdens.