Overseas Development Institute and Advancing Learning and Innovation on Gender Norms event: Changing gender norms to empower rural women and girls (New York, USA)

There is a growing recognition within the development community that gender equality requires more than just parity in access to education or other services. To truly harness the power of half the world’s population requires deeper reforms that challenge patriarchal regimes and empower women and girls to achieve their full potential.

More recently, the #MeToo and Time’s Up campaigns have catalysed public debate on gender roles and how power is exercised and contested in society – conversations relevant to women and girls in every country around the world. Such campaigns have led many to challenge the discriminatory gender norms that underlie certain practices, beliefs and behaviours. But to what extent can changing norms advance women’s rights and gender equality more broadly – especially for women and girls in remote and rural communities? And how can international policy-makers and national legislators seize the current momentum to catalyse a deeper, progressive change that leaves no one behind?

On International Women’s Day, the Permanent Representative of Ireland to the United Nations, Ambassador Geraldine Byrne Nason, the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and Advancing Learning and Innovation on Gender Norms (ALIGN) co-host an event at the United Nations on gender norm change, to shape and support the upcoming negotiations of the 62nd session of the Commission on the Status of Women.

This is a public event with open registration which closes on 2 March.