Commission on the Status of Women Updates

A Daily Round Up of the Happenings at CSW63

Monday, 11 March 2019
More than 10,000 women descend on the UN

• Mexico: has parity government
• Spain: 65% women in govt: majority of ministries; paternity/maternity leave of 16 wks
• Zambia: mainstreamed gender in climate-change strategy
• Dominican Republic: working on 3d national plan for gender equality

Ambassador Adela Raz of Afghanistan, the country’s first female ambassador who presented her credentials earlier this month, Ambassador Mari Skaare of Norway and Ms. Asila Wardak of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs prepare for a CSW sidepanel while behind them Afghan first lady Rula Ghani speaks.

Tuesday, 12 March 2019

UN Women and the Inter Parliamentary Union, as part of #WomenInPower series, presented Mapping Women in Power.
While more women serve in government than at any other time,
- Women in top level positions as heads of state decreased from 7.2 percent to 6.6 percent between 2017 and 2018. Only 10 out of 153 heads of state are women.
- Women who serve as heads of government also saw a drop, from 5.5 percent to 5.2 percent (10 out of 193.)
- More women than ever are moving beyond soft ministerial portfolios into Defense, Finance and Regional Security. 1 out 5 ministers globally are female.

Wednesday 13 March 2019

The US Mission held a morning coffee with American NGOS and announced who would be on the US delegation:

• Cherith Norman Chalet — Ambassador for UN Management and Reform and Alternative Representative to the General Assembly
• Bethany Kozma — Read more about Kozma in the PassBlue CSW Preview, which is being updated daily with exclusives as news comes.
• Valerie Huber — Senior Advisor, Office of Global Affairs at HHS (IWHC has previously highlighted Huber’s dangerous ideological positions)
• Courtney Nemeroff — Acting ECOSOC ambassador
• Pam Pryor — Senior Political Advisor, Office of Civilian Security, Democracy and Human Rights at the State Department
• Michelle Bekkering — Senior Deputy Assistant Administrator of the Bureau for Economic Growth, Education and Environment at USAID
• Kathy Wills Wright — Deputy Assistant Secretary at the State Department
• Katie Sullivan — Acting Director of the US Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women
• Kelley Currie — Former ECOSOC ambassador. Currie was not officially announced at the meeting, but had previously been named US ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues, making her part of the delegation. On the day of the meeting, she was represented the US in Geneva.
• “Other staff”

On Thursday, Christine Ahn, of Women Cross DMZ; Nobel Laureate Jody Williams; and Kozue Alibayashi, of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom joined Mimi Han (not pictured) to launch an effort to include more feminist peacemaking measures in ending the Korean War, Korea Peace Now.

Thursday, 14 March 2019

Negotiations over this year’s CSW final outcome document — which helps countries formulate their own gender policies — are underway. As of March 15, the negotiations had already become contentious, with part of the argument centering around language on “family” and even rewriting the preamble.

• The US and others aligned with restricting women’s rights, such as Poland, Hungary and Russia as well as some Gulf countries and Malaysia, want to remove from the preamble the word “reaffirms” the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, a document that sealed the work of the momentous women’s rights conference in 1995, and replace it with “take note of.”
• In addition, the word “families” is being pushed to become “family,” say some negotiators, to emphasize the traditional unit of men and women as a family component, excluding same-sex families as a unit.