Check out Julian Braithwaite's blog on why it is too soon to declare the battle for feminism "won."
An excerpt:
I only started thinking seriously about the extra obstacles that they [women] had to overcome to get to the top when I started a family of my own, and saw the pressures this put on my wife’s career. Seeing the world through the eyes of two increasingly aware daughters has helped too...
There are few if any more important challenges for the organisation that represents the world’s nations, the United Nations, than to help all societies, all around the world, undertake a similar transformation. It is the explicit mission of UN Women, and every other UN agency has this as part of their agenda.
It is also why I have supported an initiative launched by my US colleague in Geneva called Gender Champions. Along with dozens of colleagues heading missions or international agencies here, we have all made a number of pledges. Mine are to seek to embed the issues around women, peace and security in the Human Rights Council; to seek gender parity in all panel discussions and seminars in the UN here (and not to participate if there are no women involved); and to encourage others in the UK’s global networks to promote gender equality through the work they do, whether it is in development, or through political and economic relations.
There’s a seemingly unbridgeable gulf between the chief executive gazing out of her office over the sculpted skycrapers of modern London, and the mother hiding her daughter in the bush to escape sexual violence in South Sudan.
But just as that chief executive’s grandmother could never have imagined running a global company, so too the granddaughter of that Sudanese woman can have possibilities that her grandmother can’t even imagine today.
We must all support the UN in helping to make that happen...