U.N. chief warns that gender equality is ‘300 years away’
Decades of advances on women’s rights are being wound back and the world is now hundreds of years away from achieving gender equality, according to the United Nations.
Speaking to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women on Monday, ahead of International Women’s Day today, Secretary General António Guterres said gender equality is “vanishing before our eyes.”
He drew special attention to Afghanistan, where Guterres said women and girls “have been erased from public life” following the return to Taliban rule. The regime has barred women and girls from universities and some schools and the Taliban has invalidated thousands of divorces, forcing some women who remarried and are now considered adulterers to go on the run, The Washington Post reported this month. The Taliban has also blocked many female aid workers, imperiling key aid programs, including those overseen by the U.N.
In many places, women’s sexual and reproductive rights “are being rolled back,” he said. (Guterres did not mention the United States, the largest financial contributor to the United Nations, and where a nationwide right to abortion no longer exists.) Maternal mortality is on the rise, he said, and the coronavirus pandemic has forced millions of girls out of school, and mothers and caregivers out of the global workforce.
“Gender equality is growing more distant,” Guterres said. “On the current track, U.N. Women puts it 300 years away.” (He did not specify how the figure was reached.)
From Ukraine to West Africa’s Sahel region, women are “first and worst” affected by conflict, Guterres said. Only a week after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba alleged “numerous cases” of Ukrainian women being raped by Russian soldiers. Anti-trafficking groups have warned of the risk of refugees — the majority of whom are women and children — falling victim to forced labor and sexual abuse.
He didn’t mention by name Iran, which was in December ejected from the commission he addressed Monday, which is tasked with protecting women’s rights and promoting equality. Iran was ousted over its brutal crackdown on protests that broke out in mid-September following the death of Mahsa Amini, 22, in police custody after she allegedly violated the country’s conservative dress code for women. Women play a central role in the protest movement, which also includes citizens frustrated with economic mismanagement and corruption, and is calling for the removal of Iran’s theocratic government.