Happy International Women’s Day! This is an important opportunity each year for raising awareness about issue that particularly affect women, such as street harassment.
As the author of this Time magazine article notes, we’ve made a lot of progress in the past few decades regarding the education of girls, women’s access to water, women’s leadership, and maternal mortality. BUT there are still gaps in these areas and HUGE gaps in areas like gender-based violence. So as always, there is a lot more work to do.
The day coincides with the start of UN’s annual Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in New York City and I am en route to attend the NGO CSW Consultation Day today. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director, UN Women, will be one of the speakers and panelists from around the world will talk about the UN/international women’s movement from 1975-1995, the 1995 Beijing conference on women’s rights, what’s happened in the 20 years since then, and what comes next.
Starting at UN headquarters, an International Women’s Day march took place, concluding at Times Square around 4:30 p.m.
Tomorrow I have various meetings — including at the UN — and also will attend the No Ceilings Full Participation Report release. From the event press release:
“The report is the culmination of a year-long, global data aggregation effort by the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in collaboration with The Economist Intelligence Unit, UCLA WORLD Policy Analysis Center and Fathom Information Design. The report identifies the significant gains women and girls have made – and the gaps that still remain – since the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, when Secretary Clinton called on the international community to ensure “women’s rights are human rights.” Benchmarking process since that landmark event, No Ceilings is making the data open and accessible, and is pairing the report with an interactive, shareable collection of data visualizations. The data visualizations will highlight key findings from the data through interactive stories, as well as allow users the ability to explore the data on their own.”
Speakers will include Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, Melinda Gates, Her Excellency Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of the Republic of Liberia, Her Excellency Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, President of the Republic of Croatia, Malala Yousafzai, and Sheryl WuDunn.
I will tweet during (or soon after) the events (@hkearl) and blog about them on Tuesday, so stay tuned.
CSW will last about two weeks and the parallel events hosted by NGOs are free and open to the public if you’re in the area and want to attend.
