Source: TrustLaw
UN Women may be the United Nations’ youngest agency – it officially became operational only 10 months ago – but it is also one of its most ambitious with the aim of tackling the persistent discrimination and inequality faced by half of the world’s population.  

To achieve this bold agenda, the agency’s new Director of Programme Support stressed that it must step up the active engagement of the other half of the population – men, including the very ones who have been undermining women’s growth for centuries.

“We need to get men on board,” Gulden Turkoz-Cosslett told a group of journalists, almost all of them female, at the U.N. office in Bangkok on Thursday.

“We need to engage men a lot more. We have been but probably not enough,” she added. Whether this is done through advocacy or awareness-raising in schools at a young age, she said it is important that “men are seen to speak on this issue and to advocate on this issue.”

 

An example is U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon leading the UNiTE to End Violence Against Women Campaign campaign and saying, “Men must teach each other that real men do not violate or oppress women – and that a woman’s place is not just in the home or the field, but in schools and offices and boardrooms.”

Ban also launched a network of male leaders – including celebrated Brazilian author Paulo Coelho and former Chilean president Ricardo Lagos – who are speaking out against gender-based violence.

But that was in November 2009, before UN Women was formed, and Turkoz-Cosslett said a lot more needs to be done.

Sometimes that includes a shift in mindset from women’s rights activists themselves.

“For many years we have the misconception that women’s rights were an issue of women,” said Moni Pizani, UN Women’s regional programme director for East and Southeast Asia. “We’ve moved from that perspective. Women’s rights is an issue that affects everyone.”

She said UN Women had started to work with parliamentarians of both sexes – previously it worked mainly with female lawmakers – “because when we have a very low representation of women in the parliament, if we only work with women we cannot move the laws to be approved.”

She added, “We want as many voices as possible to fight for women’s rights.”

UN Women is also launching a new call for projects to be funded through the agency’s multi-donor Fund for Gender Equality in a week’s time, starting with the Arab states, given the political transformations and democratic transition the region is experiencing.

The agency said it is looking at funding projects focusing on political participation and economic empowerment of women. Winners in the first grant cycle of 2009 - 2010 include a $1.1 million project to help strengthen work opportunities for thousands of poor and HIV positive women in Cambodia.

(Editing by Lisa Anderson)