speech on Gender and Inequality
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Answer:
In the Sustainable Development Goals, we emphasize the importance of climate change. If you mess up your forest in one part of the world, it will mess up people in another part of the world.
The issue of peace is also universal. If we do not have peace in one part of the world, no one has peace anywhere in the world.
The issue of inequality is universal, between and within countries. The current extent of inequality means that people move around the world looking for means of survival and all of us will have to deal with the issue of inequality.
Gender inequality is a universal issue. Women everywhere in the world want equal pay. Women everywhere in the world want to control and decide what to do with their own bodies. And without women in the workplace, everywhere in the world, all of our economies do not grow to the extent that they need to grow.
Economic justice facilitates economic growth, and inclusive growth requires more women to be in the workplace. So, there are many common issues that women need to discuss, and that makes the issue of gender equality one of the most globalized issues of our time.
Once, the world together fought to end slavery. It was a universal issue. It did not have to be a slave’s fight to end slavery. The world, and the people of good will in the world, united to end it. The world fought racism, colonialism and apartheid together and brought them to an end. It was not just the affected people who fought. The world has to fight gender inequality together. It is not just women who must fight; men and women must fight together for us to achieve the kind of change that we desire. The nice thing is that victory is for all.
We have just come out of two very meaningful engagements as UN Women. The first is the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment, which looked at barriers to women’s economic empowerment and participation, starting from the barriers that are experienced by girls, such as in education, child marriage, and the different violations that girls experience that stop them from realizing their potential.
We have also just finished the 61st session of the Commission on the Status of Women, where we looked at women in the changing world of work. These two dialogues reached the same conclusions: the importance of macroeconomic policies that recognize the role and the participation of women, starting with issues like gender-responsive budgeting. Those macroeconomic policies recognize that all countries have babies, babies need childcare, and childcare needs to be accessible and affordable, otherwise millions and millions of women cannot participate effectively politically and economically. The fact that in most countries looking after children is a private matter for women is a barrier to their full economic participation.
