170 countries take stock for report released on International Women’s Day

POSTED ON Mar 06, 2020

Ahead of International Women’s Day on March 8, a new UN Women report warns that progress made on equality is lagging and hard-fought gains are under threat. Aligned with 2020 theme, “I am Generation Equality: Realizing Women’s Rights” the report issues a call to action to achieve gender equality and justice for this generation, 25 years after the Beijing Platform for Action.

Anya Victoria Delgado, senior program coordinator of the Feminist Alliance for Rights, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, executive director of UN Women, and Silke Staab, a research specialist at UN Women discussed the UN Women’s report “Women’s Rights in Review 25 years after Beijing”.

The report finds that progress towards gender equality is faltering and hard-won advances are being reversed. Rampant inequality, the climate emergency, conflict and the alarming rise of exclusionary politics all threaten future progress towards gender equality. The report flags the lack of effective action to boost women’s representation at the tables of power and warns that the vision of the Beijing Platform for Action will never be realized if the most excluded women and girls are not acknowledged and prioritized.

UN Women’s Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said: “The review of women’s rights shows that, despite some progress, no country has achieved gender equality. Equality isn’t just one-quarter of the seats at the tables of power. But that’s the current reality of women’s representation, across the board.”

Despite unprecedented global challenges, the report showcases successful initiatives in scaling up public services to meet women’s rights, from increasing access to contraception and childcare, to reducing domestic violence and increasing women’s participation in politics and peacebuilding.

The report is based on the UN Secretary-General’s Report, which is the most comprehensive and participatory stock-taking exercise on women’s rights ever undertaken, with contributions from 170 Member States.

The report reveals that there have been advances in women’s and girls’ rights since the adoption of the Beijing Platform for Action. There are now more girls in school than ever before, fewer women are dying in childbirth and the proportion of women in parliaments has doubled across the world. Over the past decade, 131 countries have passed laws to support women’s equality.

But progress has been far too slow and uneven:

Globally, progress on women’s access to paid work has ground to a halt over the past 20 years. Less than two-thirds of women (62 percent) aged 25-54 are in the labor force, compared to more than nine out of ten (93 percent) men.
Women continue to shoulder the bulk of unpaid care and domestic work and are on average paid 16 percent less than men, rising to 35 percent in some countries.
Nearly one in five women (18 percent) have faced violence from an intimate partner in the past year. New technologies are fueling new forms of violence, such as cyber-harassment, for which policy solutions are largely absent.
32 million girls are still not in school.

The United Nations Observance of International Women’s Day 2020 will take place at the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations Secretariat in New York on Friday, 6 March 2020. It will bring together the next generations of women and girl leaders and gender equality activists with the women’s rights advocates and visionaries who were instrumental in creating the Beijing Platform for Action more than two decades ago.

The event will celebrate changemakers of all ages and genders and discuss how they can collectively tackle the unfinished business of empowering all women and girls in the years to come. The Observance will see the participation of senior-most representatives of the United Nations system, including the Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin, UN Secretary-General António Guterres, UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, and an inter-generational dialogue with gender equality activists from ages 11 to 75. The event will also feature musical performances by UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and Grammy Awards winner Ms. Angelique Kidjo, also a speaker at the event, The Pihcintu Multicultural Choru, and Broadway Singers.