SG/SM/20625
Following are UN Secretary-Normal António Guterres’ remarks to the opening of the sixty-fifth session of the Fee on the Standing of Girls, held at the moment:
I’m very happy to deal with the Fee on the Standing of Girls. We meet for a second time within the context of the pandemic, which is having a devastating influence on girls and women. COVID-19 is a disaster with a lady’s face. The fallout has proven how deeply gender inequality stays embedded on this planet’s political, social and financial techniques. These disparities have themselves exacerbated the injury — and we’ve got all paid the worth.
Girls make up 70 per cent of the world’s well being‑care workforce, and occupy many of the jobs within the financial sectors which have been hit hardest by the pandemic. In comparison with males, girls are 24 per cent extra more likely to lose their jobs, and may count on their earnings to fall 50 per cent extra steeply. Girls’s and women’ unpaid care work has risen dramatically owing to stay-at-home orders, the closure of faculties and childcare services, elevated elder care and a lot else.
The pandemic has additionally sparked a shadow epidemic of violence in opposition to girls worldwide, each on-line and offline. Each month, the toll rises — from sexual abuse to youngster marriage. The injury is incalculable and can resound down the a long time, into future generations. Now’s the time to vary course. Girls’s equal participation is the game-changer we’d like. A long time of proof present that girls’s participation enhances financial outcomes, prompts higher funding in social safety, results in extra sustainable peace and advances local weather motion.
Now it’s the COVID-19 response that has spotlighted the nice energy of ladies’s management. Over the previous 12 months, girls leaders are amongst those that have saved transmission charges low and put international locations on monitor for restoration. Girls’s organizations have stuffed essential gaps within the provision of providers and data, particularly on the group degree. Better gender stability has led to higher responses. Conversely, international locations with much less efficient responses have tended to be these the place strongman approaches prevail and ladies’s rights are beneath assault.
The United Nations, for its half, has positioned girls on the centre of its COVID‑19 response and restoration. We issued one of many first assessments of the influence of the pandemic on girls. We now have pushed for stimulus packages that assist the casual economic system, put money into the care economic system and goal girls entrepreneurs.
And we’ve got labored with Governments and communities to deal with the surge in violence in opposition to girls, together with by preserving shelters open and shifting providers on-line. My name for a world ceasefire was adopted instantly by a name for an finish to violence within the dwelling. Extra usually we’ve got used each potential event to spotlight the effectiveness of ladies’s equal participation.
But, nonetheless, when trying the world over, we see that girls’s voices stay lacking from the best ranges of management. Girls make up a mere quarter of nationwide legislators worldwide, a 3rd of native authorities members, and only one fifth of cupboard ministers. Solely 22 international locations are headed by a lady Head of State or Authorities. And at present charges parity amongst Heads of Authorities is not going to be achieved till 2150. That’s proper, one other 130 years of males making the identical sorts of choices they’ve made for the previous 130 years and extra.
The pandemic has supplied yet one more alternative for males to dominate decision-making. A research of 87 international locations discovered that 85 per cent of COVID-19 job forces contained principally males. In international information protection of the pandemic, simply 1 of each 5 skilled sources had been girls.
Let’s think about what this imbalance actually means. When girls are lacking from decision-making, we see the world via just one perspective. We create financial fashions that fail to measure the productive work that happens within the dwelling. We create digital fora with built-in coding biases. We see choices threatening efforts to ensure full entry to sexual and reproductive well being providers and rights. And we spend trillions on weapons that fail to make us safer, whereas neglecting the violence that one in three girls globally have skilled.
Altering these default settings should be seen as an crucial. That’s the reason one among my first priorities as Secretary-Normal was to convey extra girls into management positions in my Senior Administration Group and amongst Resident Coordinators and Particular Envoys. Final 12 months, we reached gender parity on the senior-most ranges, two-years forward of our planning, and we at the moment are forging forward throughout all ranks. We’re additionally striving to make sure girls’s participation in peacekeeping, mediation and peacebuilding processes.
However, we nonetheless have heaps to do. In peace negotiations from 1992 to 2019, solely 13 per cent of negotiators, 6 per cent of mediators and 6 per cent of peace settlement signatories had been girls. Negotiations are nonetheless structured in a approach that elevates and incentivizes the very individuals who have fuelled the violence, moderately than those that are constructing peace.
Too typically, when addressing the problem of exclusion, it’s prompt that we give attention to coaching, capability‑constructing, empowerment for girls. However, girls have already got the abilities, the experience and the capability. In lots of international locations, they’re graduating from increased training at increased charges than males — and have been for a while.
What we’d like isn’t extra coaching for girls, however to coach these in energy on tips on how to construct inclusive establishments. We have to transfer past fixing girls and as an alternative repair our techniques. We should additionally assist girls leaders in all their variety and skills — together with younger girls, migrant girls, indigenous girls, girls with disabilities, girls of color and lesbian, homosexual, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer or questioning. Pandemic restoration is our likelihood to engineer a reset, reignite the Decade of Motion for the Sustainable Improvement Objectives and chart a path to an equal future for ladies and men.
I name on all leaders to place in place 5 key constructing blocks. First, understand girls’s equal rights totally, together with by repealing discriminatory legal guidelines and enacting optimistic measures. Second, guarantee equal illustration — from firm boards to parliaments, from increased training to public establishments — via particular measures together with quotas. Third, advance girls’s financial inclusion via equal pay, focused credit score, job safety and vital investments within the care economic system and social safety.
Fourth, to enact an emergency response plan in every nation to deal with violence in opposition to girls and women, and observe via with funding, insurance policies and political will. Fifth, to present house to the intergenerational transition that’s beneath approach. From the entrance traces to on-line, younger girls are advocating for a extra simply and equal world — and advantage higher assist.
This 12 months, we’ve got a chance to advance this agenda via the Era Equality Discussion board and Motion Coalitions being convened by the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Girls (UN-Girls), co‑hosted by the Governments of Mexico and France in partnership with civil society and youth.
Gender equality is basically a query of energy. We nonetheless dwell in a male-dominated world with a male-dominated tradition. This should change. And males are an important a part of the answer. This Fee will proceed to play a central function in shifting mindsets, calling out systemic bias and mobilizing tangible, significant motion.
Earlier this 12 months, we misplaced an inspiring chief of this shared trigger — Margaret Snyder, the founding director of United Nations Improvement Fund for Girls (UNIFEM) and an ally of ladies’s teams the world over. Final 12 months, reflecting on the early years of her efforts and the obstacles she confronted, she wrote: “By way of all the administrative points, we had been reminded that working to empower the poorest girls was threatening to some excessive degree and highly effective individuals. They may transfer us, however they couldn’t cease us.”
Collectively, you might be an unstoppable power. Collectively, we’ve got an opportunity to go away behind entrenched exclusion, and construct a simply and equal future. Let’s make it occur collectively, and I thanks.
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