Last week the General Assembly of the United Nations voted to create the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. When reading about these developments the first question that springs to mind is whether this body will primarily work towards gender equality or the empowerment of women, since these two goals can range from being fully compatible to mutually exclusive, depending on the issue at hand. Luckily, the UN is very honest and upfront about the purpose of its new organization, since its everyday name will simply be UN Women. We are thus dealing with an organization that has been formed to help women, and not primarily to promote gender equality–a distinction that politicians and the media alike would do well to embrace.
So what will UN Women actually do? Even though their website confuses women’s issues with gender issues time and again, as if the word “gender” were equivalent to “women”, it’s evident that they simply want to help the women of the world through working with women’s issues in a variety of settings. Focus areas listed include:
- Poverty and the Economy
- Education and Training
- Health
- Violence against Women
- Armed Conflict
- Power and Decision-Making
- Institutional Mechanisms
- Human Rights
- Media
- Environment
- Girls
On the one hand I think it’s great that they want to help women in all of these areas. I certainly do not want to see women’s human rights violated or women dying in armed conflicts. On the other hand, where on earth did they get the belief that these issues only pertain to women? Men’s health are worse than that of women, and men die several years before women do (due to stress and not biology). Armed conflicts primarily kill men, and men are the primary targets of violence even in peacetime. In the Western world it is boys and young men who are falling behind in the educational system, and the collapse of the economy has primarily led to male unemployment. Human rights issues pertain to men just as much as women, perhaps more, since men are usually the ones who are imprisoned by corrupt, non-democratic governments. The negative media image of men has been carefully mapped in books and research reports about misandry.
In other words, the very focus areas of UN Women are just as relevant for men, and yet I wouldn’t recommend holding your breath waiting for UN Men to be formed. Currently there seems to be a broad international political consensus that gender issues are about women only, which is what has led to UN Women and frightening reports that ignore the very existence of men.
In the 1995 movie The Usual Suspects, the arrested Verbal says about the legendary criminal Keyser Soze: “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”. Well, the greatest trick that feminism ever pulled was convincing the world that men’s issues didn’t exist.
