WUNRN
Women’s Feature Service
Time
to Step It Up for Gender Equality
By
Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, UN Women Executive Director
http://www.unwomen.org/en/about-us/directorate/executive-director/ed-bio
New York (Women’s Feature Service) — One look at the
headlines or the latest horrifying YouTube clip and it may seem like a bad time
to celebrate equality for women. Yet, alongside the stories of extraordinary
atrocity and everyday violence lies another reality, one where more girls are in
school and more are earning qualifications than ever before; where maternal
mortality is at an all-time low; where more women are in leadership positions,
and where women are increasingly standing up, speaking out and demanding
action.
Twenty years ago, thousands of delegates had left the
historic Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing on a high. The
overwhelming feeling was that women had won a great victory. We had indeed –
189 world leaders had committed their countries to an extraordinary Platform
for Action, with ambitious but realistic promises in key areas and a roadmap
for getting there.
If countries had lived up to all those promises, we
would be seeing a lot more progress in equality than the modest gains in some
areas we are currently celebrating. We would be talking about equality for
women across the board –and we might be talking about a saner, more evenly
prosperous, more sustainably peaceful world.
However, looking at the slow and patchy progress
towards equality, it seems that we were madly ambitious to expect to wipe out
in 20 years a regime of gender inequality and outright oppression that had
lasted in some cases for thousands of years.
Then again – was it really so much to ask? What sort
of world is it that condemns half its population to second-class status at best
and outright slavery at worst? How much would it really cost to unlock the
potential of the world’s women? And how much could have been gained! If world
leaders really saw the Beijing Platform for Action as an investment in their
countries’ future, why didn’t they follow through?
Some women are taking a seat at the top table. There
were 12 female Heads of State or Government in 1990, and 19 in 2015. But the
rest are men. Eight out of every 10 parliamentarians worldwide are still men.
Maternal mortality has fallen by 45 per cent; but the
goal for 2015 was 75 per cent. There are still 140 million women with no access
to modern family planning: the goal for 2015 was universal coverage.
More girls are starting school and more are completing
their education; countries have largely closed the “gender gap” in primary
education. Many more girls are entering secondary school too, but there is a
wide gap between girls’ and boys’ attainments.
More women are working: in 1995, 40 per cent of women
were in waged and salaried employment. At present, that proportion has grown to
some 50 per cent. But at this rate, it would take more than 80 years to achieve
gender parity in employment, and more than 75 years to reach equal pay.
So, in a sense, this year marks a great opportunity
for the world’s leaders, and a great challenge. When they meet at the United
Nations in New York in September, they will have the opportunity to revisit and
re-commit to the goals of Beijing.
Today, we call on those leaders to join women in a
great partnership for human rights, peace and development. We call on them to
show an example in their own lives of how equality benefits everyone: man,
woman and child. And we call on them to lead and invest in change at a national
level to address the gender equality gaps that we know still persist.
We must have an end point in sight. Our aim is
substantial action now, urgently frontloaded for the first five years, and
equality before 2030. There is an urgent need to change the current
trajectories. The poor representation of women in political and economic
decision-making poses a threat to women’s empowerment and gender equality that
men can and must be part of addressing.
If the world’s leaders join the world’s women this
September; if they genuinely step up their action for equality, building on the
foundation laid in the last 20 years; if they can make the necessary
investments, build partnerships with business and civil society, and hold
themselves accountable for results, it could be sooner.
Women will get to equality in the end. The only
question is: Why should we wait?