In this podcast human rights and policy specialists quit their silos and dialogue productively across disciplines in the second panel, entitled Transforming work for women’s rights, of the research-advocacy-policy workshop Substantive Equality for Women: Connecting Human Rights and Public Policy organized by UNRISD, UNWomen and OHCHR on 15 June 2015. The speakers in this panel argue that: - the world of work can be used as a good entry point for realizing women’s human rights, because labour rights are human rights. - women work all their lives, but their work is not valued. - women make up the majority of informal workers who are not covered by labour rights (minimum wages, collective bargaining, social protection); resistance from states to including them is often very high; decent work, the central demand for all workers, also demands that women’s work be adequately valued; many women instead give up and withdraw from the labour market; this trend is however invisible as it is not counted in statistics. - globalization is changing the world, but it is not delivering better conditions of work. - transforming work for the full realization of women's labour rights means we have to focus on introducing a minimum wage, effective collective bargaining and social protection instead of new programmes of corporate social responsibility. - unpaid care work is one of many major constraints preventing women from participating in the labour market, and it is a crucial constraint on their well-being, an impediment to the full enjoyment of their human rights and to women’s political participation. - a transformative approach to care that remedies the inequalities associated with care provision is needed; this means radically changing care provision (and possibly, care benefits’ accrual) by going beyond recognizing unpaid care work to reducing care (for example, making it less onerous by providing infrastructure like running water) and redistributing care work as a matter of economic justice. - while there are still some gaps in the existing international normative framework which is meant to protect and guarantee labour rights, the key gap is in implementation, not at the normative level. States urgently need to effectively implement the obligations they already have. - economic activities take place within states, which are the main duty bearers who have the obligation to implement human rights. This panel took place during the research-advocacy-policy workshop Substantive Equality for Women: Connecting Human Rights and Public Policy organized by UNRISD, UNWomen and OHCHR on 15 June 2015. Inspired by the UN Women Report on the Progress of the World’s Women Transforming Economies, Realizing Rights, the workshop connected the normative content of human rights to policy design and implementation, integrating gender equality considerations more strongly into the work on economic and social rights, and ensuring that issues like employment, macroeconomic policy and social protection are given greater prominence in work on women’s rights. The workshop was an opportunity for a dialogue between members of human rights bodies, OHCHR staff and policy analysts to creatively explore how collaboration between specialists and across silos can be enhanced to advance women’s economic and social rights within the UN system and beyond. For more information on the workshop go to: http://goo.gl/5gytjY