Your guide to CSW67 | UN Women – Headquarters

Since CSW’s inception, monumental progress has been made to integrate gender equality into mainstream international thought and action. Yet, women and girls around the world continue to face disproportionate burdens, gender biases and systemic discrimination, which hinder their autonomy, impede their access to justice and obstruct their fundamental human rights.  

Globally, we’re still centuries away from gender equality. Estimates say it will take up to 286 years to close legal gaps and remove discriminatory laws, 140 years for women to be represented equally in positions of power and leadership at work, and at least 40 years to achieve equal representation in national parliaments. As of the end of 2022, it’s estimated that around 383 million women and girls live in extreme poverty. And every 11 minutes, a woman or girl is killed by someone in her own family.  

As the world faces intersecting global crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis, heightened armed conflict and climate change, women and girls are enduring different and disproportionate impacts. Women lost an estimated USD 800 billion in income in 2020 due to the pandemic, and their participation in labour markets is lower than it was pre-pandemic.  

In line with this year’s theme of technology and innovation for women and girls’ empowerment, CSW67 is a key moment to take stock of technological progress and ensure that its rapid advance is not leaving women and girls behind. Now is the moment to adopt a human-centric approach to digitalization and ensure that the feminist principles of inclusion and intersectionality are guiding forces in technological innovation. 

We urgently need action to close the gender gaps in digital access, shape inclusive innovation ecosystems, embed gender perspectives across design, development and deployment of tech and innovation and eliminate technology-facilitated gender-based violence. For more on how we can create an equitable digital future, click here.