Global headaway on women’s rights is “vanishing before our eyes,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned Monday, saying the increasingly distant goal of gender equality could take another three centuries to attain.
“Gender equality is growing rather more distant. On the current track, UN Women thinks it 300 years away,” the United Nations secretary-general stated in a General Assembly address ahead of International Women’s Day on March 8, as he initiated two weeks of parleys headed by the Commission on the Status of Women.
“Women’s rights are heavily abused, threatened, and violated across the globe,” he added, as he ticked off a litany of crises: maternal mortality, girls kept out from school, caregivers denied work and children sent into early marriage.
“Headway won over decades is evaporating before our eyes,” Guterres stated.
He highlighted the particularly poor conditions in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, where “women and girls, all females, have been removed from public life.”
He did not name any other specific country, but Guterres pushed that “in many places, women’s sexual and reproductive rights are being reverted (and) in some states, girls going to school are at risk to kidnapping and even assault.”
Also left unmentioned was Iran, which was taken out last year from the Commission on the Status of Women being the country’s suppression of a female-led revolt since last September.
The Islamic Republic was kicked out from the commission on December 14 by a US-led voting of the UN Economic and Social Council, or ECOSOC.
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“Centuries of patriarchy, discrimination and harmful stereotyping have made a wider gender gap in science and technology,” Guterres stated, citing as an example how females only represent three percent of Nobel prize winners in the sectors.
He called for the “collective action” worldwide by governments, civil society and the private sector to provide gender-responsive education, improve skills training and invest more in “bridging the digital gender divide.”
“The patriarchy is fighting back again. But so are we,” Guterres added.
“The United Nations stands with women and girls everywhere:, he added.
