A/HRC/29/31 world with more female than male members of parliament. 33 After the introduction of the quota system, the Rwandan Parliament passed legislation to enhance gender equality, “including several laws aimed at preventing and punishing gender-based violence, laws granting more extensive property rights to women and key legislation on women in the workforce.”34 22. The protection of core labour rights, such as the rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining, is also essential for a more equal division of power and the reduction of economic inequalities. While it is very difficult to measure the causal relationship between the fulfilment of those core labour rights and economic inequalities, various studies point to a relationship between the lack of protection of core labour rights and deunionization and between deunionization and growing wage inequality. The authors of a recent study note: “The neoliberal paradigm in the early 1980s created an extremely negative environment for unions with the abandonment of full-employment policies. Since that time, labor laws across the world have become much less union friendly, and unionizing new establishments has become harder.”35 23. A sizeable amount of literature sets out the relationship between deunionization and wage inequality. The authors of a World Bank study on the economic effect of adopting or enforcing the two core labour rights mentioned above reported “very robust” findings that unions compress wage inequality. In particular, they found that the wage differentials between skilled and unskilled workers were reduced when unions were present.36 This is consistent with another study, in relation to the United States, in which the authors concluded: When individual union membership is considered, union decline accounts for a fifth of the growth in men’s earnings inequality. Adding normative and threat effects of unions on nonunion pay increases the effect of union decline on wage inequality from a fifth to a third. By this measure, the decline of the U.S. labor movement has added as much to men’s wage inequality as has the relative increase in pay for college graduates.37 A 2013 study about Turkey shows that the fall of unionization in that country resulted in higher wage inequality during the period 1980–2008.38 Also relevant is the evidence that not only does deunionization affect wage inequality, but wage inequality also affects unionization.39 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 UNDP, “Promote gender equality and empower women: where we are”. Available from www.rw.undp.org/content/rwanda/en/home/mdgoverview/overview/mdg3/. Elizabeth Bennett, “Rwanda strides towards gender equality in government”, Kennedy School Review (August 2014). See Ünal Töngür and Adem Yavuz Elveren, “Deunionization and pay inequality in OECD countries: a panel Granger causality approach”, Economic Modelling, vol. 38 (2014), p. 418. See World Bank, Unions and Collective Bargaining: Economic Effects in a Global Environment (Washington, D.C., 2002), p. 7. See Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld, “Unions, norms, and the rise in American wage inequality”, American Sociological Review, vol. 76, No. 4 (August 2011), pp. 532–533. Adam Y. Elveren, “A brief note on deunionization and pay inequality in Turkey”, The University of Texas Inequality Project, UTIP Working Paper No. 63 (2013). Available from http://utip.gov.utexas.edu/papers/utip_63.pdf. “Our findings show that the Granger causality not only runs from union density to inequality (10 countries) but also the other way around (six countries).” (See Töngür and Elveren, “Deunionization”, p. 423). 9