The UN Commission on the Status of Women: My first visit as UK Special Envoy for Women and Girls

On 8 March 2025, to mark International Women’s Day, I was proud to be appointed as the UK Special Envoy for Women and Girls by the Foreign Secretary. In this role, I will work alongside the Foreign Secretary and the Minister for International Development, to ensure women and girls are at the heart of the UK’s foreign policy and international development objectives.

This is an important role, particularly at a time where we are seeing a well-funded, global backlash against women’s and girls’ rights, persistently high rates of violence against women and girls, and increasing economic, conflict and climate crises having a disproportionate impact on women.

The UN Commission on the Status of Women 

I spent my first week as UK Special Envoy for Women and Girls participating in the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in New York.

CSW is an annual global gathering of Ministers, MPs and women’s rights organisations, designed to progress women and girls’ equality around the world. You can find out more about the advancements made since 1995 in this UN Women report on Women’s Rights in Review 30 Years After Beijing.

My objectives for CSW were to:

• reiterate the UK’s unwavering commitment to advancing women and girls’ rights
• champion women’s rights movements
• emphasise women’s role in driving global economic growth
• highlight the appalling oppression of Afghan women and girls

UK commitment to women and girls

At CSW I delivered a UK statement at the Ministerial Roundtable (02:24:57 to 02:27:31), where I made clear the UK’s commitment to maintaining women and girls’ hard-won rights, and to building on the progress made over the last decades. In this statement, I also emphasised the essential role of men and boys as allies of women and girls’ equality.

The UK supported the 2025 CSW Political Declaration, where we and other member states reiterated the need to respect, protect, and promote all human rights and fundamental freedoms for all women and girls. Despite challenging negotiations, we secured important additional language in the Political Declaration on menstrual health, tackling sexual harassment and online abuse.

Championing women and girls’ rights movements

The women’s rights movement has been at the forefront of progressive change throughout history. At CSW, I was proud to launch FCDO’s campaign to champion the grassroots women’s movements all around the world. We will work with philanthropic funds and leaders to come up with new and innovative ways of funding these organisations. As a first step in the campaign, I hosted a roundtable discussion with philanthropic funds, where we shared ideas for new alliances.

I was also pleased to meet youth advocates at CSW who reiterated the need for real, meaningful participation of young women and girls in these movements. At events on adolescent girls, child marriage and safe abortion, young women were central to the call for action.

Another issue that was highlighted for its impact on young women disproportionately is online abuse, with a global survey of young women and girls aged 15 to 25 finding that more than half have suffered harassment and abuse online.

I spoke, alongside Ofcom and fellow members of the Global Partnership for Action on Gender-Based Online Harassment and Abuse, about the need to both harness the opportunities of technology for women and girls while also safeguarding against its potential harms.

Women’s economic and political participation

Working with the Office for Equality and Opportunity, we brought together representatives from governments, international organisations, trade unions and the business community to share best practice in enabling women’s full participation in the economy. In other meetings, I shared the UK’s experience of increasing women’s political representation and supporting women once elected.

Afghan women and girls

I had the opportunity to speak at a joint UK-UAE-Norway event on Afghan women and girls and at a roundtable of women human rights defenders, including from Afghanistan. Hearing directly from Afghan women, it is clear that we will not achieve global equality without tackling the systematic oppression of Afghan women and girls. The importance of this cannot be underestimated, not just for Afghan women, but for the hard-won rights and freedoms of women around the world.

Throughout my life and career, I have witnessed the great strides made towards achieving equality for women and girls. These include advancements in employment, maternity and reproductive rights, protections against violence, and the participation of women in public life. However, as was acknowledged by myself and many of those I met at CSW, we have not achieved full equality yet, and we should not be complacent in protecting the advances already made.

I look forward to using the momentum, contacts and learnings I gained from CSW to build a coalition of women leaders, as well as male allies, who will drive progress on equality for women and girls all around the world.