Looking Back at Gender Equality

This speech was delivered to the Gender Equality session of the World Conference on Youth on the 7th May 2014. 

Before I left to come to the World Conference on Youth in Sri Lanka, I was speaking to a newspaper reporter. He said to me "gender equality is a great thing for women, but I don't see how it's relevant to everyone and other development issues."

I went on to explain how gender equality is a cross cutting issue, effecting everything from sustainable energy to education, but I think this highlights where we have got to so far. People have understood that the principle of gender equality improves the lives of women. MDG 3, achieving gender equality and the empowerment of women, has firmly put this subject on the table in development discussions. Though perhaps not everyone knows how to implement it, some don't want to implement it, and it's not been fully integrated into other development issues. 

Up to now, we haven't addressed succinctly how gender equality can improve the lives of everyone regardless of gender identity, how to address the root causes of these inequalities, and how we can mainstream it through other issues whilst maintaining it as a goal in itself. It is relevant to education, it is relevant to energy, to food security, to health and more. The MDGs went a little way towards mainstreaming gender equality, with gender based indicators across education and other goals - but to be truly mainstreamed there is still more to do. I was reading through the issue briefs for this event and there are notable cases, such as the one on full employment and entrepreneurship, where the effects of gender identity aren't considered or it's given just a name check. Adding men and women, girls and boys to a sentence isn't what mainstreaming is all about, but this has been taken as an easy approach across various policy making settings. We need to consider how issues manifest themselves differently for people dependent on their gender identities. The growth and employment consultation, as raised in the UN Women paper, highlights discrimination in accessing labour markets and variations in wages on the basis of gender identity. Talking about how we tackle these inequalities is how we can truly mainstream gender.

The issue of gender based violence was also a key area missing from the MDGs. The countries most likely to miss the targets are those involved in conflict or post conflict situations and women and young people are disproportionately victims of violence. Specific consideration needs to be given to peace and reconciliation in a future development agenda, and we need to involve women and young people, as the disproportionate victims, in peace building processes and in the commissioning of services related to sexual and domestic violence. Empowerment of women is too often being read as the disempowerment of men, gender equality does not mean that. Intimate partner violence, sexual violence, these are gendered issues that really need everybody, regardless of gender identity, on board in order to truly eliminate them. 

The MDG on education has succeeded in bringing enrolments rates of girls closer to those of boys in primary education, but are these just numbers? We need to invest in the quality of the education being provided and look beyond to secondary, tertiary, non-formal education and lifelong learning to understand how we can create education systems that support young people and adults to gain knowledge and skills, not just the youngest children, and to do this with gender sensitive facilities and curricula. 

We have made a lot of agreements in the past. The Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Beijing Platform for Action, and the International Conference on Population and Development in 1994, these all have a role to play. They aren't universal. There are countries that haven't ratified some of these agreements. There are plenty of cases where it hasn't been enacted. They are a tool that we can use, to build upon and to be bolder about our hopes and dreams going forward. But we must not forget to consider how these aims will be achieved.

The MDGs were successful in capturing the imagination of those who had to be involved in their realisation. The 8 goals could be remembered the world over. They went beyond "UN speak" and we must think about this again for the post 2015 agenda.

Civil society have been critical to achieving progress in gender equality so far and will continue to be so with any future development agenda. My organisation, the world association of girl guides and Girl Scouts, and other youth organisations have been approaching the subject of gender equality, not as a nation state, but nevertheless a fundamental partner in development. The programmes that Girl guides and Girl Scouts deliver enable girls and young women to become powerful agents of development in their local communities, in their countries and through international platforms.

MDGs weren't seen as relevant to every country - my own, the uk, probably won't meet the goal of gender equality, we have too few women in parliament. But the government don't feel under pressure to act - people in the uk see the mDGs as goals for other countries, yet they are still aspirational for us and we should want to meet them too. This needs to change in the future agenda - all countries still have problems and can still improve the lives of their citizens. We should all feel ownership of the goals and a responsibility to make them a reality - something that perhaps the MDGs have not delivered in all countries.

My task for participants in the Gender Equality strand of the conference - to have thoughtful conversations about gender inequalities in the specific breakout sessions. But also to keep thinking about gendered issues when at various other themes each afternoon - by talking about gender equality outside of discussions specifically on that topic will enable us to go beyond what the MDGs have achieved so far.