UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned gender equity remains "300 years away." AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
By Brian Bushard, Forbes, March 6, 2023
TOPLINE Decades of global progress on women’s rights are “vanishing before our eyes,” United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned in an emotional speech at a U.N. Security Council meeting Monday afternoon, just two days ahead of International Women’s Day, arguing sexual abuse, a lack of educational and employment opportunities and the rollback of reproductive rights have pushed the goal of gender equality “300 years away.”
KEY FACTS
- Guterres argued women’s rights are being “abused, threatened and violated around the world,” in his speech on the first day of a two-week series of discussions led by the Commission on the Status of Women.
- In his speech, Guterres called for “urgent action to equalize power” by increasing education and employment opportunities for women and girls “particularly in the global south,” promoting women’s participation in science and technology and creating a “safe digital environment for women and girls.”
- Specifically, he pointed to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, where he said “women and girls have been erased from public life”—the U.N.’s internal organization U.N. Women had found human rights violations against women “mounted steadily” one year after the Taliban took control of the country in 2021, while girls have been barred from attending school past the sixth grade and women have been ordered to cover their faces in public and stay at home unless of a case of necessity.
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