(2021 – 2022)

Generation Equality is a new UN Women Campaign designed to bring better results to gender equality through the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals and strengthening the  Beijing Platform for Action framework for implementation.  It is designed to bring new actors into action around gender equality issues.

UN Women’s Generation Equality campaign to accelerate gender equality actions and mark the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, the most visionary agenda for women’s rights and empowerment everywhere.

The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action of 1995 (Beijing Platform for Action) is the most visionary agenda for the empowerment of women and girls, everywhere. Developed at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China—known as the largest-ever gathering of gender equality advocates—the Beijing Platform for Action was adopted by 189 governments committed to taking strategic, bold action in 12 critical areas of concern: poverty, education and training, health, violence, armed conflict, economy, power and decision-making, institutional mechanisms, human rights, media, environment, and the girl child.

The year 2020 marked 25 years since the Beijing Platform for Action set out how to remove the systemic barriers that hold women back from equal participation in all areas of life, whether in public or in private. Despite some progress, real change has been agonizingly slow for the majority of women and girls in the world. Today, not a single country can claim to have achieved gender equality. Multiple obstacles remain unchanged in law and in culture. As a result, women remain undervalued, they continue to work more, earn less, have fewer choices, and experience multiple forms of violence at home and in public spaces.

In a new process, UN Women is bringing together the next generations of women’s rights activists with the gender equality advocates and visionaries who were instrumental in creating the Beijing Platform for Action more than two decades ago. Collectively, these change makers of all ages and genders can tackle the unfinished business of empowering women through a new, groundbreaking, multigenerational campaign: “Generation Equality: Realizing women’s rights for an equal future”.

The Generation Equality campaign demands equal pay, equal sharing of unpaid care and domestic work, an end to sexual harassment and all forms of violence against women and girls, health-care services that respond to their needs, and their equal participation in political life and decision-making in all areas of life.

Generation Equality Forums

The Generation Equality Forums are a civil society centred, global gathering for gender equality convened by UN Women and co-hosted by the governments of Mexico and France in partnership with youth and members of civil society.  The Forum kicked off in Mexico City, Mexico amid growing challenges with COVID – 19 from 29 – 31 March, 2021 and will culminate in Paris, France from 30 June to 2 July 2021.  The Forum in France will launch a series of concrete, ambitious and transformative actions in the hope to achieve immediate and irreversible progress towards gender equality.