UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres criticized today the fact that equality between women and men around the world is an increasingly distant goal that will be reached in the best case after 300 years, reported AFP. “Gender equality is getting further and further away. At the current rate, UN Women says the goal of equality will be achieved in 300 years,” Guterres said at the opening of two weeks of debates in New York at the UN Commission on the Situation of the women. Guterres said that women’s rights are threatened, neglected, trampled on in the world and that the decade-long progress is disappearing before our eyes, BTA reported.
As an example, he pointed to Afghanistan, where the Taliban took power in August 2021 and where women and girls, Guterres said, have been erased from public life. The secretary-general did not name other countries, but in many places women’s reproductive rights are in retreat and boys who go to school risk being abducted or attacked. Guterres also did not mention Iran, which was removed from the UN Commission on the Status of Women on December 14 last year because of the violent suppression of the uprising led by Iranian women since September. “Centuries of patriarchy, of discrimination, of painful stereotypes, have created a gender gap in science and technology, fields in which women have won only 3 percent of the Nobel Peace Prizes,” Guterres stressed. He paid tribute to French researcher Emmanuelle Charpentier and her American colleague Jennifer Doudna, who were the first team of women to win a Nobel Prize in science three years ago when the two ladies received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. “Men’s teams have won the prize 172 times,” Guterres pointed out. “The patriarchy is fighting back. So are we. I’m here to say loud and clear that the UN stands with women and girls everywhere,” the Secretary-General said.
