Manifesto
Manifesto
2020 must and will be the year of women who, it should be remembered, represent half of humanity.
2020 celebrates the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration on Women’s Rights. It is also the 20th anniversary of the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 recognizing the importance of the impact of armed conflict on women and girls and guaranteeing their protection and participation in peace agreements.
If this is a time to celebrate the progress made for women, it must also be a time for action, because much remains to be done.
It is now unanimously recognized that no major global challenge, whether political, economic, social or ecological, will be met without the effective participation of women in decision-making, whether in the economic world or in public institutions. To change society, we must have the power to decide.
However, despite the considerable efforts undertaken, women’s rights in the world continue to progress at a very slow pace, if not backward. At this rate it will take 257 years to reach economic parity[1].
The road to equality between women and men is still littered with obstacles. This is largely related to the fact that women are not sufficiently present in decision-making places.
The legitimate demands of civil societies still come up against immense resistance from institutions, constituted bodies, companies and organizations whose governance massively and systemically excludes women. To accelerate the pace at which people’s expectations are taken into account and to build a more sustainable world, it is necessary to promote and facilitate women’s access to positions of responsibility in all sectors of public action and political, economic and social governance.
This is not a categorical or essential people approach, but a desire to improve the quality of public decision-making and the efficiency of our companies, for the benefit of all. It is about making gender equality one of the foundations of the society we want today for ourselves, for our children and for future generations. It is about taking into account the universal principles of equality and justice and the fact that a society cannot be at peace with itself or with others, prosperous and sustainable, without the equal participation of women and men in its construction.
The world is doomed if it does not change its governance, both public and private. It is now time to move up a gear. The urgency is all the more acute as our world is in complete transformation, with the advent of artificial intelligence, climate change and energy challenges, and women must take a full part in building our 21stcentury society.
This is why women’s and mixed professional networks from the public and private sectors have decided to join forces and form an association. Gender and Governance Action Platform, to enable our societies to move faster towards that equality and society that we do not accept to wait any longer.
This association is worldwide. Its French branch was created on March 4, 2020 and is the first step towards its international launch at the Generation Equality Forum, a global gathering for equality between women and men, organized under the aegis of UN Women and co-chaired by France and Mexico, in Paris next July.
The full participation of women in the piloting of the boat-planet in which humanity is embarked, is part of the solution to the immense challenges that we must collectively overcome.
Our ambition is to make the full participation of women in the resolution of international challenges more effective, more visible, more recognized and a driving force in a common world project.
Therefore:
We call on all professional networks, women’s or working for gender equality, to join our approach.
We call on institutions and companies to support us.
We call on everyone to build a collective capacity to achieve our goal.
We call for a model of society capable of carrying the value of equality high, for a sustainable, just and peaceful world.
[1] Source : Global Gender Gap Report 2020 du World Economic Forum.