Achieving Gender Equality: Soon is not soon enough.
On 4 March, five prominent women leaders gathered at the SDG Studio in the United Nations Headquarters in New York to discuss the priority actions to advance SDG 5 by 2030 ahead of International Women’s Day.
The event, “WOMEN RISE: The To-Do List for Gender Equality”, was hosted by UN Deputy Secretary-General, Amina J. Mohammed and included Sima Bahous, UN Women Executive Director ; Hajer Sharief, equal rights activist ; Nurtaç Afridi, Godiva CEO; and Paloma Costa, Socio-environmentalist and Member of the UN Secretary-General’s Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change.
Moderated by Nahla Valji, Senior Advisor to UN Women Executive Director, the discussion was centred around the Secretary-General’s call for five transformative actions for achieving Gender Equality:
- Realise women’s equal rights
- Ensure equal representation
- Invest in women’s economic inclusion
- Take emergency action to end all forms of violence against women and girls
- Listen to the voices of young women.
Women’s empowerment, participation and representation remained at the forefront of each speaker’s call to action.
“In order to actually ensure that women’s rights are addressed properly and comprehensively, we need to have women sitting at the decision-making table,” said Hajer Sharief, an equal rights activist.
Nurtaç Afridi, Godiva CEO also asserted that women’s leadership and representation is essential for politics, media, business and economics: “It’s not logical to exclude women…it doesn’t make sense.”
Taking an intergenerational and intersectional approach, the speakers highlighted the importance of including youth’s voices in all spaces.
"Every child, every girl, every woman should have the right to be free and to live in freedom. We have this duty to make sure we are opening more and more spaces for women to participate.” Paloma Costa, Socio-environmentalist and Member of the UN Secretary-General’s Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought on disproportionate effects for those most vulnerable and continues to threaten the hard-won progress for gender equality. “The pandemic itself has also as we know negatively affected women. We need to ensure that we tackle this and that we also bring back the Sustainable Development Goals on track,” said Sima Bahous, UN Women Executive Director.
Globally, even before the COVID-19 pandemic began, 1 in 3 women experienced physical or sexual violence, mostly by a partner. The panelists called for an end to the culture of violence against women and victim-blaming, especially in the new media space. The Deputy Secretary-General underscored the importance of finding concrete solutions and the crucial role of security and legal systems to support survivors in their journey to justice.
Watch the full dialogue: https://www.youtube.com/embed/0FLA0BMzy2s