Demilitarizing for Gender Equality – Excessive Global Military Spending vs. Funding Gaps for Women’s Rights, Equality, Empowerment. You get what you pay for.

This short advocacy document from Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom calls for the reallocation of the enormous funds set aside for militarism as a means to enable the realisation of human rights, including gender equality. The document features graphs of the biggest military spenders around the global – highlighting the vast amounts of money spent by some governments on technological, and human military resources. To move towards peace and gender equality governments in all parts of the world would need to introduce gender-aware budgeting and reallocate resources towards activities that benefit women and humanity at large. Gender-aware budgeting can also help offset some of the negative effects on gender relations caused by militarised societies, by fostering alternative norms, perspectives, and attitudes. By investing in alternatives to armed conflict, states create the space for alternative solutions to tension, resource scarcity, austerity, and conflict.

The document ends by comparing spending alternatives, for example, one year of the world’s military spending would buy over 6300 years of the budget for UN Women, powerfully showing how out of proportion spending is.