W20 women’s engagement group ‘virtual’ summit begins in Riyadh
Female leaders and experts from around the world will take part in the Women 20 Summit that begins in Riyadh on Wednesday.
W20 is the women’s engagement group of the G20, the world’s most powerful nations, under the presidency this year of Saudi Arabia. Delegates at the two-day “virtual” summit will discuss how to advance women toward a more equitable future.
There are two objectives this year. The first is to offer an opportunity for both women and men around the world to share solutions for women’s empowerment through financial inclusion, digital inclusion, labor inclusion, inclusive decisionmaking and entrepreneurship.
The second objective is to deliver a communique to the G20 leaders with recommendations on how best to expedite economic recovery from the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic and achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals by supporting the social and economic empowerment of women.
“W20 delegates have agreed that we have three main areas of focus:
Women’s financial inclusion, labor inclusion and digital inclusion,” Salma Al-Rashid, the W20 “sherpa” who led preparatory work for the summit, told Arab News.
Every year a presidency introduces a fourth focus area, and this year’s presidency proposal was to promote inclusive decision making, a position jointly agreed by the summit’s 20 delegates.
“We need to ensure that women are represented at every level of the decision-making process,” AlRashid said.
The summit sessions will include G20 policies, talks about female empowerment, gender inclusion and gender equality, culture change during the COVID-19 pandemic, and next year’s W20
Italian presidency.
The head of Australia’s delegation to the W20, Erin Lynn, said the pandemic had had some positive effects in highlighting and accelerating women’s empowerment.
“Before the pandemic, women’s empowerment was a huge imperative,” she told Arab News. “Women are over-represented in low-pay, low-skilled part-time work, so empowering women in the economy is the key to inclusive growth. And the pandemic just accelerates all of this and puts a spotlight on it.”
Lynn said that women had been burdened by unpaid domestic work, and having to balance work and family responsibilities.
She said equality concerned both men and women and there had to be some balance between taking care of children and work, “but how you split that balance between different people in a household, that’s important.” One of the key positions the Australian delegation promoted in the W20 was the use of data, Lynn said. “You can’t identify your weak spots and you can’t measure progress if you aren’t collecting data.”