Let This International Women’s Day Be Different

By the end of this year the President of the United States and the Secretary General of the United Nations could both be women.

Women have made more progress towards real equality during my lifetime than in the previous 20,000 years of human history. When my mother was a British diplomat, she did not think it was odd that she had to resign when she got married. My two daughters will grow up thinking that it isn’t odd for a woman to be a Prime Minister, a Chancellor, or a President.

The Foreign Office lifted the requirement for female officers to resign in the early 70s – about the same time the Swiss gave women the vote. Today the FCO leads the private sector in implementing policies designed to prevent women falling behind professionally when they take time to have families. Here in Switzerland, CERN now has one of the best schemes I have seen for supporting women coming back from maternity leave.

Yet enormous inequality persists. Even in Europe, probably the best place in the world to be a woman, it remains culturally ingrained. Girls have been doing better academically than boys at school in Britain for several decades. Now they are doing better at university too. And yet our culture still holds women back. Extrovert charisma and assertive self-confidence are still passports to professional success, and girls learn in a thousand subtle ways that these are male attributes. The next challenge for our society is to overcome that perception – and to value other attributes more highly, such as emotional intelligence.

And in many parts of the world the rights of women are still brutally violated in the most unconscionable ways. When societies descend into violence, when institutions and laws collapse, women suffer disproportionately. Rape is a feature of almost all conflicts, and remains today a horrific instrument of war on every continent, from Bosnia, to Sudan, to Syria.

Millions and millions of girls around the world experience genital mutilation, are denied education because of their sex, do not have the right to do even the simplest things on their own, die in childbirth, are still seeing increasing rates of HIV infection, and are condemned to a lives of literal slavery.

Despite all the progress, this is the reality for much of one half of humanity. I see it every day in my work with the UN’s Human Rights Council, with the World Health Organisation, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Committee of the Red Cross. I’m proud to work for a country that has committed 0.7% of its Gross National Income to development; and has made girls and women a priority for that spending. But even so, on its own that will never be anything like enough.

Only when women can vote, are represented in a country’s parliament, in it’s courts, civil service, and prime minister’s office, do things really change. The support and good intentions of outsiders helps. But only by sharing political power can women become truly equal.

This is not so they can govern “for women”. Margaret Thatcher never did that. But so that men and women – and boys and girls – in their own country and beyond can understand that there is nothing of importance that a woman can’t do as well as a man. And perhaps most importantly of all, so that female equality does not depend on the charity of men.

It’s for the American people to decide whether they think it is time for a female President. But as a member of the UN, the UK does think it is high time for a female Secretary General.