On May 30th and 31st, UN Women partnered with the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) to discuss gender equality’s place in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Leading experts brought challenging, meaningful discussions through their passion and personal experiences from the field.
The meeting focused on “achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls,” formally known as Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5. Held in advance of the 2017 High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF), the forum aimed to take a preliminary look at "gender-responsive implementations” through case studies from its international stakeholders.
Throughout the talks, dozens of leaders offered best practices and challenges associated with SDG 5.
From its first panel discussion, the meeting was underway with reflective and actionable measures towards enhancing SDG’s role in eliminating discrimination against women and girls. Moderated by First Secretary of the Permanent Mission of Australia to the UN, Penny Morton, the presenters included Secretary General Salma Nims among other leaders in gender work.
Nahla Haidar, member of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, was transparent in her remarks on previous initiatives and the goals of the conference:
“We see that the policies for poverty eradication and prosperity promotion failed to integrate a greater gender perspective… they were unsuccessful,” she said. “[This] is some of the stock-taking that we need to do in this two-day meeting, if we want to come up with some remedial measures to this situation.”
Panelists took a deeper dive into women’s economic rights and participation in leadership. Mareeca Brown, gender specialist at the Planning Institute of Jamaica, explored the complexities of empowerment, debunking the notion that women are automatically empowered through jobs and civic opportunities.
“What we have recognized is that there has to be a more joined government approach to implementing programs. What we try to do is ensure that the labor market is positioned in a way that our females are empowered to be able to take up employment opportunities.”
Brown offered her own empirical solutions to developing empowerment within contexts of poverty and institutionalized discrimination against women.
“[We have] on-the-job training initiatives; there are economic empowerment grants, for example, especially women with disabilities, encouraging this particular group to be empowered so that they can be able to influence and manage and be independent.”
In such case studies, Brown highlighted the potential for securing women’s empowerment through partnerships. She described a hands-on approach through governmental collaboration that provides and maintains access to economic freedom.
“These partnerships help, especially with rural women on the fringes, it is important that we continue to engage them to become economically empowered. We must be engaging them to take on leadership positions, even within their own communities, which will translate into the public sector.”
Later conversations prompted a challenge-based approach to understanding gender responsive infrastructures— namely, what are the challenges facing women in work internationally and what can we do to fix them?
Experts in the field like Natalie Elwell, senior gender advisor at the World Resources Institute (WRI) identified several barriers in her work, including siloed government ministries and minimal cross-department collaboration, lack of professional training in women’s issues, and a gender bias from women employed in unrelated sectors.
Ms. Elwell continued her presentation with a range of solutions to these challenges, which had unsurprising similarities to other presentations: enhanced policies procedures, improved training and awareness, systematic partnerships within sectors and greater investment all promise to remedy the disparities between gender and employment infrastructures.
In summary, the conference was a collective of succinct and specific strategies employed by countries that wield a gendered focus in policy. In their demonstrably successful work on the ground, panelists embody the progress we continue to make for women everywhere.
But as we approach the HLPF in 2017, onlookers should note that the challenges of international stakeholders rarely mirror one another. Gendered approaches to international sustainable development cannot be simplified to a single formula or summarized by a case study.
To this point, Nepal’s National Planning Commission Secretariat, Joint Secretary and Chief Khomraj Koirala made a wise conclusion:
“There is a huge disparity between the nations and inside the nations. We have to think about the community also. We have a bold opportunity, in that we can inject a gender perspective in older infrastructures. There is no one-size-fits-all model— we should launch the policies based on evidence.”
Koirala’s comments echo the meeting’s primary call to action and its deliberate emphasis on gender equality in global communities where change is accessible. But in order to gain traction elsewhere— to design policies and build gendered infrastructures in countries that need them— gender equality needs to be presented through challenging human interactions and thoughtful discourse.
UN Women’s Deputy Executive Director Lakshmi Purri judisiously described this necessary transition: “Empowerment means transforming mindsets,” she said, “and changing social norms.”