By Patricia Scotland
Commonwealth Secretary-General
(Guyana Chronicle) This month the Commonwealth Women’s Affairs Ministers Meeting will assemble in Nairobi, Kenya. It has taken place regularly since 1985, to take stock of the current status of gender equality in our member countries, and to share perspectives and experience of how progress on this important Commonwealth priority can be achieved more swiftly. Recommendations and decisions made by ministers responsible for women’s affairs and gender will go forward to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting being convened in Rwanda next year.
The past century has witnessed the greatest advances for gender equality in human history. From New Zealand becoming the first self-governing country in 1893 to allow women to vote in parliamentary elections to Sri Lanka electing the world’s first female Prime Minister in 1960, the gender gap has never narrowed so quickly, but there is still much ground to be gained.
In order to assess and accelerate progress, considerable efforts are now made by multilateral organisations to measure progress against indicators linked to gender equality and women’s empowerment. So we know, for instance, that in the Commonwealth a girl is as likely to attend primary school as a boy, and in some countries more so. In the parliaments of 13 Commonwealth countries, 30 percent or more of members are women. Women everywhere can now expect to outlive men.
Yet against this progress, underlying systemic inequality remains persistent and widespread.
In politics, only one in five parliamentarians is a woman. In education, of every ten girls only seven attend secondary school. In the workplace, the law in 32 countries does not…
