To:	The Mayor, Board of Supervisors, & Commission on the Status of Women
From:	Patti Chang, Chair, CEDAW Task Force, President, Commission on the Status of Women
Re:	CEDAW TASK FORCE FIRST PROGRESS REPORT
Date:	November 16, 1998

In April of this year, Mayor Willie Brown and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors enacted a local ordinance (No. 128-98) modeled on the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). This Ordinance made San Francisco the first city in the United States to support the implementation of the underlying principles of CEDAW on a local level. The Ordinance requires the City to ensure the protection of human rights, including the elimination of discrimination against women and girls.

Word of San Francisco's lead in this area has spread and inquiries about our progress have come from all over the world. There has been coverage of the CEDAW ordinance in newspapers and journals throughout the United States.

The Ordinance establishes a CEDAW Task Force to assist in its implementation. The Ordinance requires periodic reports of our progress; this report is the first. In June, the Commission on the Status of Women established the CEDAW Task Force. The Task Force held its first meeting in July 1998 and has met monthly since than. Attached is a list of Task Force members and their designees.

The Task Force quickly went to work outlining its duties and responsibilities and educating itself in human rights with a gender analysis. The ordinance requires departments designated by the CEDAW Task Force to undergo gender analysis to determine whether the department is implementing the principles of CEDAW or discriminating against women and girls in its budget allocations, provision of direct or indirect services, or employment practices. Guidelines were drafted and discussed in preparation for selection of the four city departments to undergo gender analysis. The Task Force researched both demographics of each department and reviewed criteria for selection. The Task Force then chose four city departments that represent a segment of the City's workforce that the Task Force thought would be representative of the whole.

The four selected departments (City Attorney, Juvenile Probation, Public Works, Human Services) have been notified and requested to designate a management-level employee to serve as a liaison to the CEDAW Task Force and the Commission on the Status as required in the ordinance.

The Task Force next set out to draw up a Request for Proposals to hire an expertto design and conduct gender analysis. Since this type of analysis has neverbeen done before on a local government level, the search for an expert was verybroad, utilizing many local resources and extensive research on the Internet.The RFP is presently pending; inquiries to date indicate that many groups willbe watching our progress.