It is an honor to be here joining in the events to mark International Women's Day. International Women's Day is a day set aside to honor women's contributions to development and the roles they play in ensuring the well being of their households, communities and nations; it is a day set aside to reflect on the constraints and disadvantages that women still continue to face in accessing productive resources and participating equally in their societies; but most of all, International Women's Day is a day set aside to remember all the promises the world has made to women that are yet to be fulfilled.

At the Millennium Summit in 2000, the 189 member states of the United Nations made a commitment in the Millennium Declaration to achieve eight goals, labeled the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The third goal on this list seeks to achieve gender equality and the empowerment of women. In setting this goal, the U.N. member states recognized the contributions that women make to economic development and the costs to societies of the multiple disadvantages that women face in nearly every country.

The articulation of this goal and its inclusion in the MDGs marks the culmination of many years of discussions and debates and is related most directly to the discussions and promises made in four particular UN conferences held in three consecutive years in the mid-1990s: the World Conference on Human Rights, held in Vienna in 1993; the International Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo in 1994; the World Summit on Social Development held in Copenhagen and the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, both of which occurred in 1995. As you will know, the declarations and agreements made at these conferences were the culmination of years of organizing and mobilizing by women's organizations globally. The agreements underscored the importance of women's rights and freedoms, persuaded governments to recognize the gendered consequences of population, social, and macroeconomic policies, and emphasized the importance of mainstreaming gender into all development policies and practice.

Women throughout the world play critical roles in economic growth and development, and their contributions have an impact on households, communities and national economies. Over the past three decades, significant improvements have been made in women's status, especially in health and education. In the health sector, greater investment in reproductive health services has led to significant reductions in infant and maternal mortality and declines in fertility rates, reducing women's burdens associated with childbirth and child rearing. In some countries, women's life expectancy has increased by up to a decade over that of just 30 years ago. These improvements mark important progress in women's well-being and their capacity to participate fully in society. They also have contributed to reducing inequalities between women and men. However, progress has not been uniform and continues to lag in many countries.

In many developing countries women and girls are still the poorest, least educated, most unhealthy, and most marginalized segments of the population. Of the world's 876 million people 15 years and older who cannot read or write, nearly two-thirds are women according to UNESCO estimates (UNESCO 1999). Although the gender gap in primary and secondary school enrollment rates is closing in many regions, girls still lag behind boys in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Opportunities for paid employment for women relative to men have also increased, but the quality of employment for women has not increased in the same way and may even have deteriorated. The gender gap in earnings persists and women's jobs tend to enjoy less social protection and employment rights than do men's jobs. In the majority of countries in Latin America and Asia, 50 percent or more of the female non-agricultural labor force are in the informal sector, where earnings and social protection are far less secure (United Nations 2000).

And violence against women continues to be a serious violation of women's rights. Around the world at least one woman in every three has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime. And despite the gains mentioned earlier, maternal mortality remains staggeringly high: over half a million women die each year from pregnancy and childbirth-related causes (WHO 2002), 99 percent of which occur in the developing world. The HIV/AIDS pandemic presents an especially urgent challenge because, worldwide, rates of infection among women are rapidly increasing; among those 15-24 years of age, females now constitute the majority of new infections (UNICEF/UNAIDS/WHO 2002). Women's economic vulnerability and low social status contributes significantly to their increased risk of HIV/AIDS. For all of these reasons, Goal #3 is important in its own right and is salient to all the other MDG goals.

These disadvantages experienced by women are our legacy from the past century. This is a legacy that we will pass on to future generations and take with us unless we make all efforts to rectify the inequities by investing in the empowerment of women.

The MDGs offer an excellent opportunity to attend to the unfinished business of development by fulfilling the promises made by world leaders to reduce poverty, end hunger, improve health and eliminate illiteracy. Gender inequality fuels many of these ubiquitous challenges and is exacerbated by them. Conversely, gender equality and the empowerment of women can secure the future of women themselves, their households, and the communities in which they live.

As compared to the other goals in the MDGs, the goal to reduce gender disparities is unique because it is multisectoral. It cuts across all the sectors and issues addressed in the MDGs and its success depends on the extent to which it is addressed within each of the other sector-specific goals. None of the other goals can be fully met without addressing gender equality. Yet, singling it out within the MDGs as an independent goal serves to underscore its value in and of itself.

It is important to note that the target selected to represent the goal of gender equality and the empowerment of women is restricted to education -- eliminating gender disparity in primary and secondary education by 2005 and in all levels of education no later than by 2015. Two of the four suggested indicators to measure progress toward this target also reflect this emphasis on education.

This is somewhat limiting. Eliminating gender disparities in education is necessary but for several reasons it is not sufficient to meet the goal of gender equality and the empowerment of women. First, achieving parity in educational outcomes is not the same as ensuring that all girls are receive a quality education and can fully develop their capabilities. Second, even though education provides women with an essential capability and has intrinsic value, gender equality and the empowerment of women can remain elusive goals without the opportunity to fully use that capability, for example, in employment, or the agency to fully participate in decision making in the political arena. Should countries be willing to expand the number of targets to meet Goal 3, we recommend two more that represent gender equality in opportunity and agency. These are to eliminate gender inequality in access to economic assets and employment by the year 2015 and achieve a 30 percent share of seats for women in national parliaments by the year 2015.

The indicators designated by the United Nations to represent progress toward the goal of gender equality include measures to track progress in education, women's share of labor in non-agricultural employment, and women's share of seats in national parliaments. These indicators represent all three domains of gender equality and empowerment: capability, opportunity, and agency, but each has limitations. Where possible, we recommend supplementing those indicators with the following:

• completion rates in addition to enrolment rates for all levels of education;
• region-specific indicators such as gender gaps in earnings in paid and self-employment, sex-disaggregated unemployment rates, or occupational segregation; and
• prevalence of domestic violence in the past year, in addition to share of seats in national parliaments.

A recent analysis conducted by the Task Force of whether countries would meet the goal for gender equality by 2005 and 2015, revealed that the goal of gender equality is still elusive. First, the predictions for nearly all education indicators show that few countries will achieve a ratio of one - or gender parity - either by 2005 or 2015. For primary enrolment, the majority of countries, 67 of 124, are predicted to be on track, while for primary completion, the majority are predicted to have reverse gaps - suggesting that boys must be encouraged to complete primary school. In secondary and tertiary education, the pattern is as follows: the majority of countries are predicted to have reverse gaps in enrolment but to be off track for completion. Thus, in primary education, more girls complete than boys and in secondary and tertiary education, more boys complete than girls. Countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia show the poorest performance on all education indicators and these regions have the lowest averages of all regions on these indicators. Third, with respect to the economic indicator, the female share of non-agricultural wage employment in a large number of countries (96 of 105) is less than 50 percent. Fourth, in a majority of countries around the world, women hold less than 20 percent of seats in their national parliaments.

If we as a global community are to make up for lost time and accelerate the pace of progress toward the goal of gender equality and the empowerment of women, we must pay immediate attention to the following four priorities which will help us translate decades of rhetoric into action.

First, we must ensure the availability of quality data on women's lives. It is unconscionable that in this the twenty-first century, the availability and quality of the international data on gender gaps in education, economic opportunity, and women's agency are poor. The most notable data gaps are on women's economic activity and women's decision-making ability in the family, the community, and the political arena. We still lack comparable cross-country data on women's earning in various industries and occupations, the extent of women's participation in informal employment, prevalence rates on violence against women, women's share of seats in municipal and other local level legislative bodies, among others. Good data are essential for effective policy. Without appropriate sex-disaggregated data, efforts to develop and implement policies are hampered, accountability is difficult to establish, and the impact of programs and interventions is hard to assess. If the goal of gender equality and the empowerment of women, as well as its specific targets are to be met, international and national agencies must gather and standardize data on women. Efforts are underway through UNSI to rectify gaps in data collection and ECLAC is taking the lead in standardizing existing data. These efforts need to be given higher visibility and priority and must be coordinated to achieve maximize impact.

Second, greater financial and technical resources must be made available to national level government-run women's machineries dedicated to promoting the status of women and to the international UN agencies whose primary charge is to achieve gender equality, such as UNIFEM. Even in international agencies, such as the World Bank, UNDP or WHO, gender units are constrained by poor staffing and small budgets. Many of the policy commitments made by countries at UN gatherings cannot be implemented because they are not adequately financed at the international or national levels. Funding for both national and international gender agencies should be benchmarked against budgets for other "cross-cutting" issues, such as the environment or children.

Third, appropriate existing international policy frameworks and mechanisms must be used to achieve each of the recommended targets for the goal of gender equality. The Education For All initiative must serve as the mechanism through which priorities are set and resources are channeled to achieve gender equality in primary, secondary, and tertiary education. But if the EFA goals are to be met, the initiative requires an infusion of increased funding and organizational strengthening. Donor governments and countries alike need to bolster their verbal commitment by making adequate financial pledges. Efforts must also be made to ensure that at the country-level there is coordination between the EFA initiative and other policy processes that seek to meet the same goals, such as the World Bank's Poverty Reduction Strategy Process (PRSPs). Most importantly, we must assure that the high-level international visibility of the MDGs is harnessed to strengthen the EFA initiative. The risk of distracting governments and donor countries from meeting the goals of the EFA by demanding allegiance to multiple international initiatives is real and must be addressed by better country-level and international coordination.

Equal access to employment should be monitored through the ILO's Decent Work initiative. The primary goal of the initiative is "to promote opportunities for women and men to obtain decent and productive work, in conditions of freedom, equity, security and human dignity" (Anker 2002) The gender-sensitivity of the decent work framework, and the gender-disaggregated indicators it proposes for monitoring country performance, make it suitable for tracking the progress of countries toward the goal of gender equality. We recommend that the ILO be given the resources and authority to take the leadership in providing data and monitoring progress.

And, finally, to secure women's agency, at the international level, the United Nations, through the Secretary-General's office, should spearhead a new campaign for zero tolerance of violence against women. This campaign should highlight the epidemic proportions of gender-based violence and raise the resources necessary for countries to implement action plans on which they should be monitored and held accountable.

But by far the most useful framework to hold countries accountable for meeting the goal of gender equality and the empowerment of women is the Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). All nation states that have ratified the convention are obligated to take all necessary measures at the national level to implement the provisions within it, including providing legal protection against discrimination of women. We recommend that the CEDAW mechanism be used to monitor progress toward the MDGs and to hold nation's accountable and that the U.S. take the steps necessary to ratify CEDAW and join the world community in underscoring its commitment to the rights of women. I heard this morning that Afghanistan had ratified CEDAW. Shouldn't the U.S. follow?

Ultimately, for all of this to happen, we need political commitment and determination at the highest levels of international agencies and national governments to end gender inequality and empower women. Gender inequality is deeply rooted in entrenched beliefs and attitudes, societal institutions, and market forces. The only way that the social change required to bring about gender equality will occur is through the dedication of visible and credible champions at the international and national level. Gender inequality is not a problem that has no solution. It persists partly because of the lack of leadership to institute the policies that can trigger social change and to allocate the resources necessary to get the job done.

It is time for the international community to live up to the promises made to women through the numerous commitments made, conventions signed, and treaties ratified over the past three decades. On this International Women's Day let us jointly commit to honor our promises and hold others accountable. To borrow from the words of Robert Frost,

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But we have promises to keep,
And miles to go before we sleep,
And miles to go before we sleep.

Thank you.

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