CEDAW/C/GC/36 (e) Establish targets, within a given timeline, to ensure parity in positions in higher education, including senior positions, professorships chancellorships and vice-chancellorships in universities; (f) Establish policies and quotas for the equal representation of women in governing bodies in higher education, such as senates and councils, and in research bodies. IX. Rights through education 76. Since 1985, several United Nations international conferences have focused on human rights, women, social issues and sustainable development and have identified numerous actions to promote gender equality and the empowerment of women. Many of the conferences emphasized education as the means for achieving those goals and for improving the position of women in society. Education equips individuals with the skills to be adaptable to the needs of changing societies and therefore has a multiplier effect in enabling women to claim rights in all spheres, beyond the school. However, women’s rights through education are far from being realized. 77. In spite of regional disparities, global data indicate that more women than men have higher educational certifications and thus are the more highly qualified source of human capital. However, men with lower levels of certification are favoured for certain jobs and positions over women with higher levels of certification, contributing to the universal phenomenon of horizontal and vertical sex-segregation of labour markets. Certification therefore does not carry the same social currency for women and men. Even where both sexes have equal levels of education, men are often given preferential treatment in employment. 13 78. Such systemic patterns become entrenched, in particular in the labour market, which operates on the basis of the “man as breadwinner” ideology, resulting in men occupying dominant positions in wage labour. As a result, in most societies, women experience lower levels of employment and higher levels of unemployment and of poverty, are more highly represented as part-time workers, earn less than men, on average, are disproportionately represented in vulnerable areas of work, and have less opportunities for decent working conditions. Women are underrepresented in decision-making positions at all levels of social and political institutions and lack real personal autonomy. Although increased access to education has improved the condition of women’s lives and that of their children, the potential for education, as it presently exists, to shift the overall balance of power in the economic, political and social spheres and to make a strategic difference in terms of the empowerment of women, has not been achieved, owing to cultural beliefs and practices that reproduce entrenched gendered ideologies, structures and systems. 79. That consistent pattern is linked to gender socialization processes that reproduce and maintain a sexual division of labour, which defines what is feminine and masculine and is in turn linked to a public/private dichotomy, a system in which males dominate the public sphere and females the private sphere. The result is that, rather than being transformative, institutionalized schooling becomes an instrument of the State for reproducing the gender order and maintaining the male/female, dominant/ subordinate and public/private hierarchies. 14 __________________ 13 14 17-19774 See the statement by former Committee member Barbara Bailey to the high -level round table held on the margins of the fifty-fifth session of the Commission on the Status of Women. Available from www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/csw55/panels/HLRTA-Bailey-Barbara.pdf. Ibid. 21/23