Women Adequacy Housing Rights Research: International Regulations And Practice In China

Housing is a indispensable means of subsistence for human beings, and everyone is basically entitled to adequate housing right. At least a hundred million people live without even a shelter all over the world, and among those who live in absolute poverty women account for70%. In China, there still exists the inequity of housing distribution on male and female. The study of suitable housing right is in the preliminary stage, and a comprehensive and deep research on women housing rights is devoid. Accordingly, this paper will discuss the rationale, practice and development of suitable women housing right, so as to deepen and expand the academic research on this issue.Women are the main users of housing, thus most affected by it..The most significant and obvious measure of attributing housing right to women lies in the expression of the establishment, and only when the involved wording and the discourse of right are explained in a clear, consistent and continuous way, and further used in documents of housing rights, can women’s housing rights be guaranteed.Globally women housing right are often infringed, sometimes even under deprivation. There are a couple of reasons accounting for this phenomenon:women are always subjected to exclusion and unable to obtain the right of possessing and using the land, which involves social-gender biased law and religion; custom and tradition that make women submit to masculine status; existence of gender biased financial aid policy; the factor of domestic violence, which means women always tolerate their husbands’ abuse, but unwilling to get away from the violent relationship and face a homeless consequence, and due to straight discrimination, the women divorced will suffer from more hardships in terms of using and getting shelters; meanwhile, women are not thoroughly participating in the housing procedure, in some areas, women are still rejected from the community policy-making institution and housing campaignIn China women housing right are contained in the unspecific legislations and policies on gender equality property right and matrimonial right, and closely related to marriage and income. The examples from single parent housekeeping working woman investigation team reveal the women housing discrimination behind multiple institutions and systems, namely the conspiracy of national system, custom, culture and market to some extent, put it another way, the conspiracy of public patriarchy and private patriarchy, which not only presents the common gender blindness of housing legal policy, but more likely causes multiple-space exclusion and extrusion to a part of marginally impoverished women, and this discriminative reality has remoulded women’s petition for space.In order to guarantee their proper housing rights, women should use the discourse of right as a means of legal appeal; to develop this right, the goal throughout the system is to eliminate the systematic and structured oppression on women, therefore different scales of housing movements can be carried out, into which women can be taken as a whole, and independent housing movement that parallels those masculine housing movement might also be launched; in the meantime, the country and related organizations should undertake more obligations, all sectors of society must fully acknowledge and understand women’s attention and demand of housing right, and the existing problems.