Source: United Nations (Video News)
Press Conference by Sarah Hendriks, UN Women Director of Policy, Programme and Intergovernmental Division, and Papa Seck, the UN Women Chief of Research and Data section, on the report “Women’s Rights in Review 30 Years After Beijing.”
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According to a new UN report, women’s and girls’ rights are facing unprecedented growing threats worldwide, from higher levels of discrimination to weaker legal protections, and less funding for programmes and institutions that support and protect women.
UN Women’s latest report “Women’s Rights in Review 30 Years After Beijing”, published ahead of the UN 50th International Women’s Day on 8 March, shows that in 2024 nearly a quarter of governments worldwide reported a backlash on women’s rights.
Addressing the press today (6 Mar), Sarah Hendriks, Director of UN Women Policy, Program and Intergovernmental Division said, “The good news story is that the world today is actually more equal for women and girls than ever before, and that tells us that progress is, in fact, possible. And yet, the report will also show, with its data and evidence, that this progress has been too slow, too fragile, too uneven, and most importantly, that this progress is not guaranteed.”
She continued, “The world is, in fact, experiencing a growing backlash against gender equality and women’s rights. Anti-rights actors who are increasingly well-funded and coordinated are actively undermining long standing consensus on key women’s rights issues and where they cannot roll back legal or policy gains altogether, they seek to either block or slow down their implementation.”
She said, “Right now, a girl who is born today will wait until she is nearly 40 years old until she sees equality in parliaments everywhere, parity in parliaments. She will be 68 years old until a child’s early enforced marriage is ended around the world, and she will not even live to see the day by which extreme poverty, which has a female face, is eradicated from this earth. She’ll be 137 years old by the time the feminization of poverty ends.”
Also addressing the press today, Papa Seck, Chief of UN Women’s Research and Data section, said, “Over the past 30 years, important steps have been taken to achieve the vision of the Beijing platform for action. The proportion of women in Parliament has doubled, maternal mortality has declined by a third. Girls have achieved parity with boys in upper secondary school, which is crucial for them to drive. There have been over 1500 legal reforms in 189 countries to level the playing fields for women and girls.”
He stressed, “But we also see that there is much, much further to go. We have more women in Parliament than ever before, but still three quarters of parliamentarians are men. This means that laws and policies that don’t reflect women’s lives. Moreover, those women who do put themselves forward for political office often face unprecedented levels of violence and harassment turbocharged by the misuse of digital technology.”
He said, “Maternal mortality is down, but still millions of women die needlessly in pregnancy and childbirth. And the truth is, progress on this most preventable of problems has largely stalled since 2015. Though the world has reached parity in education overall, 60 million girls, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, are still not getting the opportunity to finish school. And closely related to this is the fact that one fifth of girls globally are still married as children.”
He also said, “Legal reforms have been critical in advancing gender equality and the areas where countries have been the most active, but laws still need to be implemented.”
He continued, “The gender gap in labor force participation, which is around 30 percentage points, has barely moved in two decades, and Covid 19 certainly made things worse.”
He concluded, “And just in 2022, cases of conflict related sexual violence have increased by 50 percent, and almost all of the victims of these horrific crimes are women and girls.”