Isn’t it weird that the illustration of the woman is used in a serious manner to advertise for the Bic shavers? “For legs that beckon?” I thought we were over these stereotypical depictions of women, Canada? Photo taken on the subway in Toronto and posted via my new iPhone app!

Civil Society Celebrates Creation of Gender Equality Entity After Four Years of Advocacy

Press Release from the GEAR Campaign, 30 June 2010. Contact: Charlotte Bunch, 732-642-5271 or cbunch@ig.org, Bani Dugal, 646-404-4210 or bdugal@bic.org, Rachel Harris, 301-535-9702 or rachel@wedo.org

The Gender Equality Architecture Reform (GEAR) Campaign celebrates the United Nations General Assembly resolution, agreed to on 30 June and to be formally adopted by the General Assembly on Friday, 2 July, to establish “UN Women”—the new gender equality entity at the UN.   This move has been sought by women’s organizations and other civil society organizations around the world since the UN established a System-Wide Coherence Panel for UN Reform in 2006. Charlotte Bunch of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership (CWGL) at Rutgers University, a founding member of the GEAR Campaign, stated, “We have high expectations for this new agency to be a solid foundation for advancing the human rights of women as central to global policy efforts to reduce poverty and move toward greater realization of peace and democracy in the world.   The coalition of women’s groups and other social justice, human rights and development organizations that played a pivotal role in this effort will now turn its efforts toward ensuring that the new body has the human and financial resources necessary to succeed.”

Particularly notable in the resolution are the paragraphs regarding the importance of civil society participation in the new entity.  The body must have increased operational presence at the country level including engagement with women’s groups and other civil society organizations invested in gender equality and the empowerment of women.

The GEAR Campaign’s global, regional, and national networks will be contacting UN representatives at all levels to work with the transition process and the new Under Secretary-General, once appointed, to ensure they are connected with organizations on the ground ready to provide their expertise and support.

As the new entity is developed, GEAR supporters will continue to advocate for four major elements critical to its implementation:

• Meaningful, systematic and diverse civil society participation at all levels
• Strong, country-level operational capacity and universal coverage
• Ambitious funding with stable and predictable resources aimed at reaching $1 billion within a few years
• Strong leadership at the top with an Under Secretary-General who combines a global vision with gender equality expertise on the ground

“We know that this is only the beginning,” stated Rachel Harris of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO).  “We must continue to ensure that we are building a United Nations that really works for all women on the ground.  Implementation requires active engagement of all stakeholders to get the entity up and running successfully.”

Background

The GEAR Campaign is a network of over 300 women’s, human rights and social justice groups around the world that have been working for four years to gain UN Member State and UN Secretariat approval for creation of a larger more coherent coordinated UN agency that can advance further the UN’s   mandate of working for gender equality as a crucial component of development, human rights, humanitarian concerns, peace and security.

The new Gender Equality Entity to be headed by an Under-Secretary General, will consolidate the four existing UN bodies on women, increase operational capacity at the country level and have gain increased funding for work on women’s empowerment and advancement. The UN currently has four separate entities dedicated to women’s issues which will be combined in the new entity: the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), the Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW), the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW), and the Office of the Special Adviser to the UN Secretary-General on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women (OSAGI).  Bringing these together and coordinating their work more with gender mainstreaming throughout the UN system should the UN and governments to deliver more effectively on their obligations and many commitments to advance gender equality, women’s empowerment and women’s human rights.

For more information please go to the GEAR Campaign website http://www.gearcampaign.org – or contact the GEAR Campaign at: gearcampaign@gmail.com

Pay close attention to gender stereotyping around you. To unlearn sexism, you have to notice it first.

http://xkcd.com/

Today, a bunch of us arrived in Cairo, Egypt in preparation for our meeting to design and launch a network of peer support for young feminists in the Arab world. Exciting!

I have big hopes set for this meeting (organized and led by women under 30) and for a new wave of young feminism that is of and for our region. The first thing I want to share with you is that we set out from the beginning to be a network that depends very little on money. Indeed, you can see it reflected in our choice of venue for the accommodation of our meeting participants, the Lotus Hotel in Cairo,which also housed participants of the Gaza Freedom March last December. We have grown accustomed, in the NGO world, to put our participants up in fancy hotel rooms and conference halls. This is the first time that I am actually spending my nights in a youth hostel that costs $25 a night for a double room. Who said we need to raise tens of thousands of dollars to hold a regional conference? Take a look at these simple rooms in the pictures. This is what a feminist meeting looks like!

In the spirit of the Creative Commons Salon in Beirut that took place on Friday (and which I sadly missed), I’ve played around with Lara Zankoul‘s amazing photography (original photos here) and made it into a “We Can Do It!” poster.

Don’t you just love the expression on her face?

The radical feminist organizing in the MENA region emerged 20, 30, 40 years after the similar movements in the West. In Turkey, for example, it didn’t start until the late 1980s. This is not because the women in our region were stupid or were not politically engaged or did not have demands. It is rather because we were under autocratic regimes or in the middle of wars and post-colonial struggles that there was no space for any of these movements to rise. The moment a small space became available, you immediately saw these initiatives taking form. The problem is that by that time, there was already an international discourse at the United Nations around gender and development. So when these movements rose, they clashed with these existing structures of funding and NGOs and civil society that were already in place. Most of the initiatives were thus quickly institutionalized and tamed. And from this clash rose the whole debate on whether feminism is authentically local or a Western import.

My non-verbatim account of a comment made by Pinar Ilkkaracan at the GFW meeting in Jordan: Feminisms in the Middle East and North Africa

I will be speaking at this conference tomorrow – just realized it will be open to the public, so come along if you’re interested!

The Global Fund for Women invites you to attend the conference “Feminism in the Middle East and North Africa: Theory, Practice, and Realities” of its Advisory Council Members of the Middle East and North Africa. The Conference will bring together GFW Advisors, experienced women’s rights activists in the MENA region, to collectively analyze and present the challenges, problematic, opportunities and success of the women’s rights movements. The conference will be held at the Sun Meeting Room in the Kempinski Hotel (Abdul Hamid Shoman Street, Shmeisani) in Amman. Please find below the conference program details and speakers. Kindly, RSVP as soon as possible to MENA region manager at GFW, Zeina Zaatari, at zzaatari@globalfundforwomen.org.

First Day; Friday, March 19:

Second Day; Saturday, March 20:

Most of the 54th CSW sessions were packed, and I mean PACKED. They were filling up 30 minutes before the sessions started. So I couldn’t blog much from inside the sessions (believe it or not, I couldn’t take my laptop out because the rooms were so packed). I will sum up my notes later tonight. In the meantime, here are some pictures I took today.

Soon to take place on March 25 & 26, ArabNet 2010 is the “first international conference for the Arab web industry, bringing together leaders from across the MENA, Europe and Silicon Valley to discuss cutting-edge trends and emerging opportunities. Through pitch sessions, the conference will feature the region’s brightest ideas and most promising Internet start-ups, and connect them with the internet ecosystem: incubators, angel investors, venture capitalists, established Internet companies, NGO’s and influential bloggers.”

So it’s an excellent opportunity for entrepreneurs who have brilliant ideas for Internet companies to pitch their ideas to potential investors. Have you been sitting on a great idea? Do you have the next Yamli.com or Facebook up your sleeve? Remember, even Google started as an idea that two college boys had.

Now, to the important part. As you have guessed by now, I am a feminist, and my readings in feminism have taught me to always look at such a terrific opportunity through a gender lens. My first impression is that most of the submissions will be made by men. Why? Many reasons. 1) More men study techie majors in college than women because of the imbalance in perception of gendered jobs. 2) More men want to be entrepreneurs than women because men are seen as the bread-winners, the money-makers, and women are encouraged to have a steady job or stay at home and get an allowance from their fathers or husbands. 3) Although completely untrue and unfounded, people in our region generally tend to think that brilliant ideas (start-ups especially) come from men, not women. Save for Oprah Winfrey, the majority of start-up billionaire stories are those of men. Think about it. In our region, also men come to mind, although I immediately think of Razan Khatib from Jordan as a pioneering woman entrepreneur. And finally 4) as women, we are raised to believe we are not good enough. Now this might be a hard concept to stomach, but it’s true. Often, we are under the illusion that women believe they can be as good as men, especially if we are middle-class, college-educated women. But they don’t.

Anyway, all of this to say that I would like to support any young Arab woman who would like to make a pitch to ArabNet 2010. I have some years of experience in start-ups and business plan writing, and I can give you a pep talk! Simply get in touch. I also invite all experienced techie & business women who would like to join me in supporting young women to raise their hands (i.e. leave a comment) so that we can raise more support & encourage more women to make a pitch.

Nayla Mouawad & Solange Gemayel. I don’t know what to comment, whether to laugh of to cry, but this video is a fine example of why it is more important to have feminists in parliament than it is to have women. But I want to still say that we need women to be represented – but not this bad a representation!