The Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, deplored on Monday that “equality” between women and men in the world is an increasingly distant goal, which will be achieved at best “in 300 years”.
“Gender equality is getting further and further away. At the current rate, UN Women sets it at 300 years from now,” Mr. Guterres denounced in a speech, opening two weeks of debates at the Commission on the Status of Women in New York and two days away from International Women’s Day on March 8.
In the General Assembly auditorium, the UN chief said that “women’s rights were being abused, threatened, violated around the world” and that “the progress made over decades was disappearing before our eyes”. He took the example of Afghanistan, where the Taliban regained power in August 2021 and where “women and girls have been erased from public life”. He did not name other countries, but in “many places women’s sexual reproductive rights are being rolled back and girls who go to school are at risk of being abducted and assaulted.”
Mr. Guterres did not mention Iran, expelled on December 14, 2022 with “immediate” effect from the Commission on the Status of Women by a vote of the United Nations Economic and Social Council, at the instigation of the United States. United, because of the repression of a revolt led since September by women. “Centuries of patriarchy, discrimination and painful stereotypes have created a gender gap in science and technology”, sectors in which women represent only “3% of Nobel laureates”, a-t- he took as a concrete example.
He paid tribute to French researchers “Emmanuelle Charpentier and American Jennifer Doudna, historically the first team of women to win a Nobel Prize in science three years ago”, i.e. the 2020 chemistry prize. “Teams of men have won it 172 times,” Mr. Guterres further lamented.
“The patriarchy strikes back. U.S. too. I am here to make it clear and strong that the United Nations stands with women and girls everywhere,” the Secretary-General concluded.