Your Excellency Ambassador Delphine O of France,
Dr Roopa Dhatt, Executive Director of Women in Global Health,
Anita Bhatia, Deputy Executive Director of UN Women,
Excellencies, distinguished guests, dear colleagues and friends,
It is my great pleasure to join you today to celebrate International Women’s Day.
This year’s theme is “Women in leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world”.
This is an important and timely theme, given the global impact that the pandemic is having on everyone, but particularly on women.
During this pandemic, progress on gender equality has regressed.
We have seen appalling increases in violence against women and reduced access to services for sexual and reproductive health.
In relative terms, employment losses have been higher for women than for men.
Women have also borne an additional and disproportionate burden of care for children and older people, and in social and health care.
And women account for almost seven out of ten reported health worker infections, reflecting the fact that women make up roughly 70% of the global health workforce.
So why is it that women deliver the majority of health and social care globally, but don’t have equal opportunities to lead it?
Why do women occupy so few leadership positions in health, or on national COVID-19 response teams?
That’s why, after my election in 2017, we made sure that we had gender parity in our senior leadership team here at headquarters, becoming the first UN agency to do so.
And although we still have more work to do, the proportion of women in senior positions at headquarters and the regional offices has increased to 43%, and we are committed to reaching gender parity as soon as possible.
In November last year, the World Health Assembly designated 2021 as the International Year of Health and Care Workers.
This is a year to renew our focus on advancing equity, as a cornerstone of WHO’s mission to promote health, keep the world safe and serve the vulnerable.
In January, I called on all countries to advance vaccine equity: to work together in solidarity to ensure that within the first 100 days of the year, vaccination of health workers, many of whom are women, and older people was underway in all countries.
We must also advance gender equity.
In February, WHO launched the Gender Equal Health and Care Workforce Initiative with the government of France and Women in Global Health, which has four key aims:
To increase the proportion of women in health and care leadership;
To promote equal pay and bring unpaid work in health systems into the formal labour market;
To protect women in health and care from sexual harassment and violence at work;
And to ensure safe and decent working conditions for women health and care workers, including access to personal protective equipment and vaccines against COVID-19.
Our partners in this initiative, Ambassador Delphine O and Dr Roopa Dhatt, are both with us today, as is Anita Bhatia, Deputy Executive Director of UN Women.
And today I am pleased to be signing a new Memorandum of Understanding with Women in Global Health.
As we respond, recover and rebuild from the pandemic, we must continue to make gender equality a priority.
I ask you all to support the Gender Equal Health and Care Workforce Initiative and make a commitment to act, in whichever way you can, to achieve its aims.
I’m also pleased that to mark International Women’s Day, WHO is launching a new Global Breast Cancer Initiative, to reduce mortality from breast cancer by 2.5% every year until 2040, saving 2.5 million lives.
Breast cancer has now overtaken lung cancer as the world’s most-diagnosed cancer.
Survival five years after diagnosis now exceeds 80% in most high-income countries, but survival rates are much lower in lower-income countries. There is much we can do to save these women’s lives.
Finally, I would like to thank every woman who works for WHO, and for everything you do that makes this organization great.
And I would like to thank every woman who works in health and care globally. Our world is a healthier, safer, fairer place because of you – and our commitment is to make it a healthier, safer, fairer place for you.
I thank you.