Women Face Discrimination in Every Region of the World - General Assembly President

Opening remarks by H.E. María Fernanda Espinosa, President of the General Assembly at the General Assembly (Informal plenary): Gender equality and women’s leadership for a sustainable world (HLPF 2019 Event).
”No country has achieved full gender equality and women continue to face discrimination in every region of the world,” President of the General Assembly, Maria Espinosa said at the opening of a high-level meeting of the Assembly titled “Gender equality and women’s leadership for a sustainable world.”
During her one-year-long mandate as the President of the United Nations General Assembly, Maria Fernanda Espinosa from Ecuador, only a forth women out of 73 persons at the helm of the GA, established an informal group of eminent leaders with the aim “to identify barriers that hinder women’s full participation and leadership and share best practices to speed up women’s empowerment.’
Opening a high-level panel discussion during a second meeting of the group held Monday (15 Jul) in New York, Espinosa said: “we have come a long way since the adoption of the Beijing Platform for Action nearly 25 years ago. The percentage of female parliamentarians has doubled in that timeframe. As we can see from our list of speakers today, women in power are no longer a rarity.”
However, she pointed out that women lag behind on every Sustainable Development Goal, citing the fact that only 42 percent of countries give women equal rights to land ownership as they give to men, while only 60 percent of countries give women equal access to financial services.
“No country has achieved full gender equality,” said Espinosa. “Women continue to face discrimination in every region of the world - from suffocating stereotypes to discriminatory laws, harmful practices and violence,” she also said.