Women and gender issues

While more Governments were adopting laws and policies to address the multiple forms of violence against girls, those youths still bore the heaviest burden of the failure to secure equitable development for all — as victims of female genital mutilation, rape and both commercial and sexual exploitation — a scenario which, if left unchecked, would morally doom efforts to reach the Millennium Development Goals, the Commission on the Status of Women heard today.

Education was the gateway to economic opportunity and the key means for unlocking women’s potential, the Commission on the Status of Women was told today as it continued its high-level review of the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action and the outcome of the General Assembly’s twenty-third special session on gender equality, development and peace for the twenty-first century.

The proverbial glass ceiling not only continued to curtail the aspirations of schoolgirls and women scientists and engineers around the world, but was best described in too many societies as a “cast-iron ceiling”, the Commission on the Status of Women was told today during two expert panels on bolstering the access of women and girls to science, technology, education and training.

While the last year had seen significant efforts to improve women’s status around the world — including the landmark creation of the United Nations new gender entity, UN Women — the global report card was decidedly mixed, but investment in girls’ education could propel both economic growth and women’s equality, United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro said today, as she opened the fifty-fifth session of the Commission on the Status of Women.

The Commission on the Status of Women will hold its fifty-fifth session at United Nations Headquarters in New York from 22 February to 4 March 2011, two weeks that will bring together Government officials and representatives of the United Nations, civil society, the media and the private sector.

On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Security Council resolution 1325 (2000) on women, peace and security, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women wishes to reaffirm its commitment to the spirit of this resolution and its integral link with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.

The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women today reaffirmed its commitment to the spirit of Security Council resolution 1325 (2000) on women, peace and security and its integral link to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, as it wrapped up its forty-sixth session.

With the inception of a new law and the country’s first shelter to assist victims, Albania was strengthening its arsenal to stamp out domestic violence, the South-Eastern European country’s delegation told the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women today.

Fifteen years after ratifying the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, Papua New Guinea was still struggling to change entrenched cultural attitudes and norms that kept women from attaining crucial government and political positions and contributed to high rates of violence against them, the country’s delegation told the Women’s Anti-Discrimination Committee today.

With amendments to the country’s Constitution, the enactment of a new Penal Code and the creation of the Committee on the Equal Rights and Opportunities within the Turkish Grand Assembly, Turkey had worked consistently over the last decade to improve the status of women, the Turkish delegation told the forty-sixth session of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women today.