On July 1, after a session that lasted more than 11 hours, the UN General Assembly voted unanimously to create a new entity combining four of the original administrative units dealing with women’s affairs. The new entity has been given the title UN Women, appended with “UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women.” It will be run by UN Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro, a woman and No. 3 in the UN chain of command.
At the same time, the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) decided to focus on gender equality and the empowerment of women this year. On July 2, after a week of intensive discussions, it was declared that DESA would concentrate on improving women’s access to official economic systems and their participation in major decision-making, putting an end to violence against women, increasing education opportunities, stamping out illiteracy, improving women’s health, ending sexual discrimination and increasing access to microcredit. UN Economic and Social Council president Hamidon Ali said that gender equality aids economic growth.
The UN has always been a major platform for the women’s movement, advocating gender equality right from its inception by establishing the Division for the Advancement of Women in 1946. The influence of this division has benefited greatly from the collective momentum provided by women’s groups around the world, and with the increase in its budget from the original US$200 million to US$500 million, it can now more effectively create and influence policies on women’s issues. This is not only cause for celebration, it might also provide the impetus for change, as some women’s groups in Taiwan have sought to replace the word “women” with “gender,” and even publicly criticized the use of the terms “men/women” or “both sexes” as reactionary.
The 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing featured the new policy of “gender mainstreaming,” a politically correct term to describe ways of dealing with factors contributing to social inequalities. This extended the definition of “gender” to include polygender identities, beyond the conventional polar concepts of male and female. The problem is that, just like age, gender is an abstract concept and an arbitrary method of classification. Furthermore, the term itself does not actually have any inherent meaning and is therefore open to subjective interpretation, which means that it can be manipulated to further different agendas.
Gender is simply an arbitrary basis for grouping people for the purpose of allocating rights and duties, for which there is no corresponding basis in reality. Consequently, in official UN and EU documents and statistical information, the terms “gender,” “sex” and “male/female” are often interchangeable and employed simultaneously. In both theory and practice, then, the terms “gender” and “women” can coexist and be used to describe each other. The fundamental goal of gender equality is the abolition of stereotypical male and female roles, an equitable division of labor and the resolution of issues surrounding transgender identities and forms of expression.
One of US President Barack Obama’s earliest appointments was to make Melanne Verveer the first US Ambassador-at-large for Global Women’s Issues. He also set up the White House Council on Women and Girls. Now that the UN has further demonstrated its resolve to raise the status of women’s institutions, reflecting the importance of women’s affairs and policies in contemporary global politics, one can only hope that the government in Taiwan and local women’s groups will take another look at women’s affairs.
Ku Yenlin is the chairperson of the Senior Citizen Leaders Association.
TRANSLATED BY PAUL COOPER
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