‘Why wait for equality?’ Asks, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka

United Nations Under-Secretary-General and the Executive Director of UN Women, and former Deputy President of South Africa, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, has always taken strong stands on the issues of women’s equality. In the light of the Beijing Conference, she has urged people everywhere to step up their game in order to achieve gender balance.

According to UNWomen, Ngcuka said, “Twenty years ago this September, thousands of delegates left the historic Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing on a high. The overwhelming feeling was that women had won a great victory. We had indeed – 189 world leaders had committed their countries to an extraordinary Platform for Action, with ambitious but realistic promises in key areas and a roadmap for getting there.”

It sure was a huge win and when we look back today; we can see that progress has been made in some sectors almost uniformly across the world. At the same time, a lot of work needs to be done in many areas. Ngcuka agrees. According to her, if all the participating countries had kept all the promises that were made 20 years ago, we would’ve had more substantial reasons to celebrate than just be happy about the slight change in the data we have today.

She further points out that even though Maternal mortality has fallen by 45 per cent, the goal for 2015 was 75 per cent and that 8 out 10 parliamentarians across the world are still men.  140 million women in the world, still have no access to modern family planning and the goal for 2015 was universal coverage. Referring to all this and more, UNWomen reports her saying that going at this rate, it would take more than 80 years to achieve gender parity in employment, and more than 75 years to reach equal pay. “Women will get to equality in the end. The only question is, why should we wait?”

ORIGINAL SOURCE: UNWomen

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