By: Valerie Percival / May 12, 2017
Canada has been working to empower women globally for decades — why aren’t we making more progress? As Valerie Percival writes, efforts to build gender equitable societies must work on both the bricks (laws, formal institutions and services) and the mortar (societies’ beliefs around gender).
The first global conference on women was held in Mexico in 1975. The International Conference on Population and Development (along with the UN commission by the same name) was established in 1994. The landmark Beijing Conference on Women that resulted in the Beijing Platform of Action was held in 1995. The UN Security Council passed its critically important resolution on Women, Peace and Security 1325 in 2000, with its main messages affirmed in multiple follow-up resolutions. The third Millennium Development Goal focused on gender equality and empowerment of women, while the follow-up fifth Sustainable Development Goal commits to achieving gender equality and empowering women and girls.
Read more: opencanada.org/features/what-real-feminist-foreign-policy-looks/