China's experience with gender equality shared at UN

A delegate of the Chinese women's association on Tuesday shared the nation's experience in achieving gender equality and empowering women and girls during the annual United Nations meeting focused on women's issues.

The 68th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), which started Monday and will run to March 22, is an annual meeting to address the inequalities, violence and discrimination against women.

"Improving mechanisms and continuous investment are the core conditions for achieving gender equality," said Huang Xiaowei, vice-president of the All-China Women's Federation, sharing China's experience and progress at a ministerial round table on the priority theme of the CSW.

"To ensure the fruits of economic and social development benefit a wider range of women more fairly," the main approaches include developing national and local action plans, establishing a well-coordinated interdepartmental mechanism and increasing diversified inputs that benefit women, said Huang.

Huang, who is also the vice-chairperson of the National Working Committee on Children and Women under China's State Council, said at a CSW side event on closing the gender gap in education, that China "regards educational equity as the basic goal and policy of modernization".

China has "developed strategies and measures to eliminate gender gaps at all levels of education", and "ensures the equal right to education for girls and women", said Huang.

"As the world undergoes significant changes not seen in a century, the global cause for women faces tremendous challenges but also harbors new opportunities," Huang noted at the general discussion of the CSW.

Under such context, China calls for building a foundation for woman's security, said Huang.

That can be done by "further improving laws and policies, increasing the supply of resources, strengthening public services, eliminating prejudice, discrimination and violence against women, cracking down on violations of women's rights and elevating the protection of women's rights to the will of the country and internalizing it into social behavioral norms," she said.

"We should enhance education for girls and women, promote women's employment and entrepreneurship, support women's economic empowerment, ensure women's equal participation in high-quality development and national governance, help women overcome livelihood difficulties and developmental gaps, and thus injecting new vitality into sustainable development," said Huang.

To address women's current issues, China also calls for building a bridge for global cooperation, she said.

"Strengthen exchanges and cooperation in areas such as poverty reduction, food security, pandemic response and vaccines, and the digital economy," Huang said, calling for increasing financial and technical support for women in developing countries, narrowing the development gap, and making women's goals an early achievement of the UN's 2030 Agenda.

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday emphasized that at the current rate of change, legal equality for women could take 300 years to achieve, as could ending child marriage.

He told a UN commemoration that over two-thirds of those killed and injured in Gaza are reportedly women and girls.

"Today is the first day of Ramadan. … I am appalled and outraged that conflict is continuing in Gaza during this holy month," Guterres said Monday at the opening of the CSW.

President of the General Assembly Dennis Francis said on Monday that 1 out of every10 women lives in extreme poverty. According to the UN, about 10.3 percent of women around the world today live in extreme poverty, and they are poorer than men.