Twenty years ago, in Beijing, over 37,000 of us gathered to set a global road map for achieving gender equality. I was 25 at the time and it was both wildly frustrating and exhilarating to watch the governments of the world hotly debate the twelve key issues that affected our lives. They quibbled over words and fought over our rights. And at the end of it all they adopted the Beijing Platform for Action which identified the steps that they, and we, should take to ensure that, within a generation, women around the world would live free from discrimination.
The United Nations Beijing Platform for Action identified twelve areas for action and countless strategies to ensure women would have access to education, receive equal pay, be free from harassment when they walked down the street, receive justice from the legal system when their husband raped them, be able to access comprehensive sexuality education that would educate them about their bodies and their relationships, be leaders and politicians, and many other measures of equality.
But, the Beijing Platform for Action didn’t touch on the need to end online violence against women, nor did it reference “climate change” (though there is a whole chapter on women and the environment), nor did it talk about respectful relationships education, or even talk very much about the impact of the World Trade Organisation rules on women’s lives (for example, the loss of livelihood from agricultural trade liberalisation). It was silent on these issues, because it was adopted twenty years ago, and these debates have all emerged in the years since 1995.
Today, in New York, the governments of the world are coming together to adopt a Political Declaration at the UN Commission on the Status of Women.
The Declaration marks the twenty year anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action. It is a strong call for gender equality, the empowerment of women and girls, and the realisation of their human rights.
But it also misses the mark. Where the Beijing Platform for Action set a roadmap for action, this time round, the Governments of the world have not been able to name the inequalities that shape our days, mark our bodies, and transform our lives. This Political Declaration is silent on climate change. Is silent on online trolling of women. Is silent on goals for women’s leadership, or education, or health. It fails to set a roadmap for transformative action.
In part this is because, right now, the UN is really focused on negotiating 17 new global sustainable development goals with 169 targets to replace the Millennium Development Goals that were to half poverty by 2015. The negotiations are huge and all consuming. And excitingly the draft Sustainable Development Goals are on track to set some great targets for gender equality: targets that will see money flowing to gender equality programs all over the world. The Sustainable Development Goals set a roadmap.
And in part the Political Declaration stumbles because it was negotiated before over 9000 government and non-government representatives arrived in New York for the annual two week Commission on the Status of Women meeting. Our voices were shut out of the process, and the Political Declaration is poorer for it. The CSW is too important a space for gender equality to exclude the voices of women of the world. The working methods of the CSW must integrate the vital expertise of women advocates who work daily on the frontlines of the gender equality struggle.
Voices like those that gathered together on Saturday by the World YWCA. These leaders of today, some of whom were not born when the Platform for Action was adopted, gave voices to a bold vision for gender equality. Globally, young women aged between 18-30 years are around 860 million of the world’s population in 2010. That is 860 million beating hearts and 860 million opinions. These leaders of today know what is needed to achieve equality in their lifetime. If their voices had not been excluded from the process, perhaps the Political Declaration would not be stuck in the 1995 time warp.