The Role of Men and Boys in Achieving Gender Equality

From the introduction

"Since its establishment in 1946, the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women has actively promoted women's rights in political, economic, civil, social and educational fields at the international level. While the Commission remains the principal policy-making body on gender equality, in recent years increasing attention has been given to gender equality in other inter-governmental contexts, including the Economic and Social Council and its functional commissions and the General Assembly, as well as in the Security Council.

At the global level, Governments made commitments to gender equality in the Beijing Platform for Action, adopted by the Fourth World Conference on Women in September 1995, and the outcome document of the twenty-third special session of the General Assembly entitled "Women 2000: Gender equality, development and peace for the twenty-first century", held in June 2000. These commitments have been reaffirmed in the outcomes of other major international conferences and summits, including the Millennium Declaration. The existing international legal framework, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and ILO Conventions, have encouraged and accelerated efforts in this regard.

Over the past decade it has been increasingly emphasised that attention to gender perspectives will contribute to the achievement of all other development goals. The Millennium Declaration, adopted by Member States of the United Nations in September 2000, highlighted that promotion of gender equality was essential for the eradication of poverty and hunger and the promotion of sustainable development. Gender equality is a Millennium Development Goal in its own right, but gender perspectives must also be included in the implementation of all other Millennium Development Goals, on poverty and hunger, education, child mortality, maternal health, HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, environmental sustainability and global partnerships for development.

The achievement of gender equality is still to a large extent considered a women's issue. Attention to the critical role men and boys can play in the achievement of gender equality is relatively recent within the United Nations. The shift from a focus on women to the perspective of gender relations created the opportunity to give increased attention to men and boys. Over the years a stronger focus has developed on the positive role men and boys can and do play in promoting women’s empowerment in the home, the community, the labour market and the workplace. It is recognised that a better understanding of gender roles and relations, and related structural inequalities, increases opportunities for effective policy measures and actions for overcoming inequalities. The role of men and boys in challenging and changing unequal power relations is critical.

The need to increase attention to men and boys has been raised in intergovernmental contexts - in the Commission on the Status of Women, in other functional commissions of Economic and Social Council, and in special sessions of the General Assembly. However, the United Nations has not yet given comprehensive attention to the role of men and boys. In its forty-eighth session in March 2004, the Commission on the Status of Women will, for the first time, focus specifically on the theme: "The role of men and boys in achieving gender equality".

In the Beijing Declaration Governments expressed their determination to encourage men to participate fully in all actions towards gender equality. The Declaration emphasised that equal sharing of responsibilities and a harmonious partnership between women and men were critical to their well-being and that of their families as well as to the consolidation of democracy. The Beijing Platform for Action stated: “Equality between women and men is a matter of human rights and a condition for social justice and is also a necessary and fundamental prerequisite for equality, development and peace. A transformed partnership based on equality between women and men is a condition for people-centred sustainable development". The Platform also emphasised the principle of shared power and responsibility between women and men at home, in the workplace and in the wider national and international communities. It stressed that gender equality could only be achieved when men and women worked together in partnerships, and that the principle of equality of women and men had to be integral to the socialisation process. Specific recommendations focus on promoting harmonisation of work and family responsibilities for men and women; encouraging men to share equally in childcare and household work; and promoting programmes to educate and enable men to assume their responsibilities to prevent HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.

In addition to emphasising that policy-making processes required the partnership of women and men at all levels, and that men and boys had to be actively involved and encouraged in all efforts to achieve the goals of the Beijing Platform for Action and its implementation, the outcome document of the twenty-third special session of the General Assembly, adopted in 2000, identified a number of specific obstacles in relation to the implementation of various critical areas of concern of the Beijing Platform for Action. These included persistent gender stereotyping which had led to insufficient encouragement for men to reconcile professional and family responsibilities, and insufficient sharing of tasks and responsibilities by men for care giving within families, households and communities; unequal power relationships between women and men, in which women often did not have the power to insist on safe and responsible sex practices, and lack of communication and understanding between men and women on women's health needs..."