'Dismantling gender stereotypes' sounds uncontroversial. But what if the CEDAW Committee’s new draft recommendation risks embedding those stereotypes and making them harder to shift?
The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women is finalising General Recommendation No. 41 — a document that will interpret States parties’ obligations to eliminate ‘gender stereotypes’ under the Convention. AAWAA recently made a submission to the drafting process.
Draft GR 41 contains powerful analysis of how sex-role stereotypes harm women. But because it is framed around ‘gender’ rather than biological sex — without ever defining what it means by ‘gender stereotypes’ — parts of it risk reinforcing the very stereotypes it sets out to dismantle.
The framing problem
The Convention does not use the phrase ‘gender stereotypes’. Article 5(a) refers to ‘stereotyped roles for men and women’. Article 10(c) calls for the elimination of ‘any stereotyped concept of the roles of men and women’. Both provisions are grounded in biological sex. The shift to ‘gender stereotypes’ throughout GR 41 would be harmless if the draft defined its terms — but it does not.
This matters because ‘gender’ now carries two distinct meanings in law and policy. In the Convention’s context, it describes the socially constructed roles imposed on people because of their sex. But in many contemporary legal systems — including Australia’s — ‘gender’ has come to mean a self-declared internal identity, detached from biology. If GR 41’s obligations apply to the second meaning, the document is no longer about dismantling roles imposed on women as a biological sex class. It is about something else entirely.
Every specific concern we raised in our submission flows from this foundational ambiguity. Unless the Committee anchors GR 41 in biological sex from the outset, the rest of the document cannot do what it promises.
Three places where the draft reinforces what it should dismantle
1. Gender identity made co-equal with biological sex
Paragraph 4 lists “sexual orientation and gender identity” among intersecting grounds of discrimination under the Convention. Paragraph 20 addresses ‘LBTI women’ — folding transgender identity into the same category as lesbian identity — and refers to “the well-established binary and heteronormative notion of women” in the context of judicial discrimination.
Framing biological sex as merely a ‘notion’ — one that courts can move beyond — treats the category of ‘woman’ as a stereotype to be overcome, rather than a class of persons to be protected. This is precisely backwards. The stereotypes the Convention addresses are imposed on women because of our biology. You cannot dismantle those stereotypes by dissolving the category they are imposed on.
The conflation of lesbian identity with transgender identity compounds this. Lesbians are protected under CEDAW as biological females who face discrimination because of their sex and sexual orientation. In Australia, the Australian Human Rights Commission denied the Lesbian Action Group — biological females — an exemption to hold female-only events, on the basis that excluding males who self-identify as lesbians was discriminatory. This outcome is directly produced by the logic that paragraph 20 risks embedding in international human rights law.
2. Self-ID law as stereotype reinforcement
Paragraph 36 sets out the obligation to name, identify, challenge, dismantle, and remedy gender stereotypes. Paragraph 38 rightly warns States to watch for “legislation, policies, and measures that, though intended to protect women, run the risk of reinforcing stereotypes and creating new ones”.
Both paragraphs fail to apply this analysis to sex self-declaration laws — the most relevant contemporary example. If law grants someone recognition as a woman on the basis of self-declaration alone, it must already have a concept of ‘woman’ it is prepared to recognise. That concept, in practice, is almost always a cluster of sex-role stereotypes — appearance, manner, social presentation. Self-ID frameworks do not dismantle these stereotypes; they require conformity to them as the price of legal recognition.
In Australia, self-declaration laws have been introduced in most jurisdictions without meaningful consultation with women’s advocacy organisations — the precise unintended stereotype reinforcement that paragraph 38’s own instruction should have identified.
3. The surrogacy silence
Paragraph 30 states that “women can be viewed solely as reproductive instruments rather than full human beings”. Paragraph 24 identifies the stereotype that women’s reproductive capacity creates a social obligation of care. Paragraph 25 states that “motherhood is often considered a duty and not a choice”. This is some of the strongest language in the draft.
It describes surrogacy exactly. All forms of surrogacy — whether described as commercial or altruistic — institutionalise the treatment of women as reproductive instruments for others’ purposes. Yet GR 41 says nothing about it. The silence is not neutral: it implies that the reproductive-instrument stereotype can be addressed everywhere except the context where it is most formally and legally entrenched.
Our submission asked the Committee to name surrogacy explicitly as an institutionalised form of the stereotype paragraphs 24, 25, and 30 identify, and to recognise that all forms fall within States parties’ Article 5 obligations.
Why this matters in Australia
International treaty language travels. It is cited in domestic litigation, used to shape government policy, and invoked by advocacy organisations on all sides. GR 41’s framing of gender identity as co-equal with sex will be used in Australian courts and policy processes to argue that female-only services, sex-disaggregated data, and women’s right to organise as a biological sex class must yield to identity claims. It is already happening.
A General Recommendation that genuinely dismantles sex-role stereotypes must begin from sex reality, not erase it. That is the argument AAWAA put to the Committee, and it is the argument that needs to be won.
You can read our full submission, below.
