UNIS/SGSM/1477
7 March 2025
When the doors of equal opportunity are open for women and girls, everyone wins.
Equal societies are more prosperous and peaceful – and the foundation of sustainable development.
On this International Women’s Day, we recognize thirty years of progress and achievement since the landmark United Nations conference in Beijing.
This transformed the rights of women – and reaffirmed those rights as human rights.
Since then, women and girls have shattered barriers, defied stereotypes, and demanded their rightful place.
But we must be clear-eyed about the challenge.
From pushback to rollback, women’s human rights are under attack.
Age-old horrors – violence, discrimination and economic inequality – still plague societies.
And newer threats such as biased algorithms are programming inequalities into online spaces, opening-up new arenas of harassment and abuse.
Instead of mainstreaming equal rights, we’re seeing the mainstreaming of misogyny.
We must fight these outrages.
And keep working to level the playing field for women and girls.
We need action to unlock finance so countries can invest in equality – and to prioritize those investments.
Action to open-up equal opportunities for decent work, close the gender pay gap, and tackle challenges around care work.
Action to strengthen and implement laws to end all forms of violence against women and girls.
Action to secure women’s full participation in decision-making, including in peacebuilding.
And action to remove the obstacles to women and girls in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
The United Nations Pact for the Future, and the Global Digital Compact offer blueprints to guide these actions.
When women and girls can rise, we all thrive.
Together, let’s stand firm in making rights, equality and empowerment a reality for all women and girls, for everyone, everywhere.
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The new Permanent Representative of Somalia to the United Nations (Vienna), Khadra Ahmed Dualeh, presented her credentials today to the Director-General of the United Nations Office at Vienna (UNOV), Ghada Waly.
The new Permanent Representative of Georgia to the United Nations (Vienna), Alexander Maisuradze, presented his credentials today to the Director-General of the United Nations Office at Vienna (UNOV), Ghada Waly.
"Today we mourn the one million children, women and men slaughtered in the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda." — António Guterres
Forest crime is interconnected with other types of illegal activities such as illegal mining, trafficking in persons and drug trafficking, says a new study from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) issued today.