Dialogue on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in Achieving the SDGs through Promoting Women’s Participation in STEM

(Link to video remarks can be found here.)

Excellencies,

Distinguished Guests,

Colleagues and friends,

Gender equality is one the most critical Sustainable Development Goals. It is its own stand-alone Goal, number 5. However, it is integral to all 17 Sustainable Development Goals, as in all of them we must consider the gender aspects.

As the Secretary General put it in the latest “The World’s Women 2020” report, twenty-five years since the adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, progress towards equal power and equal rights for women remains elusive. No country has achieved gender equality, and the COVID-19 crisis threatens to erode the limited gains that have been made. The Decade of Action to deliver the Sustainable Development Goals and efforts to recover better from the pandemic offer a chance to transform the lives of women and girls today and tomorrow.

This discussion is not only about empowering women and girls, but about unleashing their potential, which again would result in greater good for not only women and girls themselves, but for whole societies.

Gender equality should be a topic of every day, but particularly now, as we have just observed the International Day of the Girl Child and International Day of Rural Women in October, and the still on-going 16-Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, that started on 25 November and ends on the World Human Rights Day on 10 December.

The gender digital divide in connectivity, use of devices, skills, and jobs, is real. On the International Day of the Girl Child, the Secretary General pointed out, that there is a massive gap in internet usage across geographies and generations. The global internet user gender gap is growing, from 11 per cent in 2013 to 17 per cent in 2019, and it is widest in the world’s least developed countries at 43 per cent. In middle and higher-income countries, only 14 per cent of girls who were top performers in science or mathematics expected to work in science and engineering compared to 26 per cent of top-performing boys.

Today we will focus on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, known as STEM, which is one of the fastest growing fields, and yet women make up only 28% of the workforce in STEM. In particular, in some of the fastest-growing and highest-paid jobs in computer science and engineering, the gender gap is high.

Thus, we need to act now to ensure, that girls and women are, not once again, left behind, but an active part in leading in these fields.

We are co-hosting this event with the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates, in light of their increasing interest in gender equality. In fact, the World Economic Forum 2021 ranked the UAE as a leading country in gender equality in the region. Amongst many successes, the UAE is particularly successful in equality in education. The literacy rate for both men and women is close to 95%, and 77% of Emirati women enrol in higher education after secondary school. And most interestingly, 56% of UAE government university graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) are women. Thus, no wonder, the Emirates has great stories to be shared with all of us and particularly in this topic, that we are all keen to learn more about.

As noted by President Xi Jinping in his remarks for the 25th Anniversary of the Beijing Declaration, “we still have a long way to go and need to work real hard to build a world in which women are free from discrimination as well as a society of inclusive development.”

I look forward to productive discussions.

Thank you.