The years 2020 and 2021 will go down in history as the time when the COVID-19 pandemic caused the deepest recession of the century and killed and sickened many millions of people. Yet trade geeks might remember those years as the period during which gigantic advances were made in women’s leadership and influence on trade policies and trade systems. A woman took the helm of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development for the first time and a woman was once again appointed to lead the International Trade Centre. Also remarkably, after a slow start, a WTO Informal Working Group (IWG) on Trade and Gender was finally established in late 2020 (as the next step from the Joint Declaration on Trade and Women’s Economic Empowerment of 2017). This chapter leans and builds on the author’s previous work and provides an update on the IWG’s work and the engagement of WTO members (Friends of Gender) interested in contributing to that work. Based on limited information available, the chapter gauges how much of the IWG’s work programme has permeated into general WTO operations. In other words, it assesses (based on a text search) the degree to which the ongoing negotiations of trade rules/structural discussions on joint statement initiatives – investment facilitation, e-commerce, and micro, small, and medium enterprises – have taken a gendered lens. It also reports on the advances achieved in mainstreaming gender in the WTO Secretariat and membership representation in the WTO.

A gender-responsive trade policy can lift obstacles faced by women in trade through, for instance, financial and non-financial incentives, or by providing access to trade-related infrastructure, especially in rural areas. Trade policies can create new opportunities for women entrepreneurs and female farmers, and for women to enter the workforce, in export sectors. In light of these opportunities, the chapter seeks to explore how capabilities for women can be expanded and enforced in global trade. Among other things, the research will delve into the ability of trade agreements to contribute to gender equality. Specifically, the chapter analyses these issues from the institutional aspect of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its role in designing gender-inclusive trade policies and monitoring such policies through the Trade Policy Review Mechanism (TPRM).

Women across countries and regions face many obstacles that hamper their capacity to fully benefit from international trade and, more generally, from their participation in the economy. Those shortcomings are also found in the least-developed countries (LDCs), but they are magnified by persistent and acute development challenges that include high levels of poverty, deficient infrastructure, limited productive capacities, and a mostly low-skilled labour force. Trade has been singled out as an effective tool for a fruitful integration of the LDCs into the global economy, and preferential trade regimes have been set up to facilitate the process. However, have LDCs benefited from such regimes and, above all, has trade provided meaningful opportunities for women’s economic empowerment? This chapter will try to provide an answer to these questions. First, it will look at underlying factors that play a role in determining women’s likelihood to participate in trade and benefit from it, including women’s level of education, time availability, agency, and participation in the labour market. Second, it will explore the role women play and the gendered obstacles they face in the female-intensive sectors of agriculture, artisanal and small-scale mining, Export Processing Zones (EPZs), and tourism. The chapter will then suggest measures that would help women benefit more from their participation in these sectors and highlight the overall economic and societal benefits that this would imply. The measures identified as being potentially beneficial to women will be checked against measures that have been put in place by the LDCs through rescue packages. This will allow a preliminary assessment of the matching between what women would need, especially in a post-pandemic environment, and what so far has been provided to them.

The Caribbean women’s rights agenda has been framed by the broader agenda of international platforms for action ‘adapted to national and regional priorities’. Yet the Caribbean feminist agenda is hardly present in international trade discussions and negotiations. The chapter will examine the development of gender equality/feminism in the Caribbean and its intersections with trade; highlight and examine the current feminist agenda in the Caribbean; and ultimately consider whether and if so how that agenda manifests itself in domestic and regional policy and practice in the Caribbean. It will do so against the backdrop of broader efforts internationally to mainstream gender and will make recommendations about how the Caribbean should approach trade and gender in the future.