Beijing+25 Regional Review Meeting

Item 1: Opening of the meeting
Item 2: Adoption of the agenda and organization of work
Item 3: Election of chairpersons

The high-level dialogue will focus on the main findings of the regional synthesis report and will discuss key opportunities and challenges, including digitalization and its impact on the economy and gender equality, in the ECE region with high-level government representatives as well as representatives of civil society and other stakeholders.

The discussion will highlight effective economic and social policies to close existing gender gaps in economic activities, including labour market participation, entrepreneurship, labour migration, gender pay gap, access to highly skilled jobs, career development, and policies for gender responsive social protection and public services. It will also address the life-long effects of the gender wage gap, including the pension gap. The dialogue will include policies to facilitate the equal access to decent work for all, recognition and redistribution of unpaid work, sharing of family responsibilities; as well as measures promoting the diversification of occupational choices by both women and men. Special attention will be
given to reducing gender inequalities in rural areas.

Across the ECE region, violence against women and girls remains a pervasive problem. It occurs in peaceful times as well as in armed conflict and post-conflict settings and impacts women’s health with long-lasting consequences. It occurs in many different forms ranging from intimate partner violence, domestic violence, sexual harassment and cyber harassment, to femicide, forced and child marriages, honour-related violence and female genital mutilation. It persists in the public and private sphere as well as at the workplace. The discussion will address concrete actions to prevent and end gender-based violence, including through legislative and policy measures, strong and consistent implementation mechanisms for existing legislation, provision of efficiently coordinated essential public services, access to justice, financial support and awareness-raising efforts. Challenges such as the lack of sexdisaggregated data and gender statistics for monitoring and evidence-based policy making and the need to mobilize men and boys as allies for change will also be discussed.

Education is essential to attain gender equality. While girls tend to outperform boys in terms of learning outcomes in schools, gender segregation in educational choices persists. The exchange will highlight best practices to enable women and girls to meet the demands of the digital transformation and to enter the currently male dominated fields of education; including science, technology, engineering, mathematics and information technology. The discussion will also address stereotypes in teaching and will consider the importance of access to quality education to empower all learners, including women facing multiple forms of discrimination, to become agents for change and specifically women and girls to make their own decisions, including regarding their sexual and reproductive health.

The achievement of transformative gender equality related changes by 2030 requires innovative solutions to mobilize financial resources. The discussion will highlight effective measures to integrate a gender perspective in macroeconomic and budgetary decisions on policies and programmes at national and sub-regional levels. In the session, concrete initiatives to generate the necessary resources to deliver the expected results in line with the Beijing Platform for Action commitments and gender related SDGs targets will be presented, from both the public and private sector, including resources from innovative sources of funding. Also, the discussions will be focused on how targeted fiscal policies in social sectors and investments in agriculture and infrastructure could contribute to gender equality.

Women’s equal participation in decision-making is not only a matter of justice but can also be seen as a necessary condition for women’s interests to be taken into account. Across the ECE region, women remain underrepresented in decision-making positions at most levels. Young women and women from marginalized groups are widely excluded from decision making and the benefits for their meaningful engagement and contribution to policy related formulation and implementation are not recognized. The debate will focus on the variety of policies and temporary measures to boost women’s full and equal representation, based on Leaving No One Behind principles. It will give the opportunity to share best practices and initiatives that have been successfully implemented in the countries of the region and attempt to identify a range of possible actions to advance women’s leadership and contribution to policy- and decision-making, including on conflict prevention and resolutions. The meeting will also be an opportunity to address the important role of civil society, including youth, and women human rights defenders, in achieving gender equality.

Climate change affects women and men differently. The discussion will address how climate change amplifies existing gender inequalities including the health impact of gender based vulnerabilities and how policies in the public and private sectors could be gender mainstreamed to ensure that everyone has access to the resources they need to adapt to and mitigate climate change. The exchange will particularly focus on the full and equal participation of women and girls as agents and beneficiaries of sustainable development and their crucial role in climate change adaptation and mitigation at all levels, from negotiating policies to natural resource management and sustainable consumption.

Gender equality is both captured as a stand-alone goal (SDG 5) in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and reflected across all the goals. The 2030 Agenda confirms that realizing gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls will make a crucial contribution to progress across all the goals and targets. The systematic mainstreaming of a gender perspective in the implementation of the Agenda is crucial. Thus, gender equality acts as a catalyst to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda providing an unprecedented opportunity to transform the lives of women and girls. This final panel discussion will focus on how strategies and policies for the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action will contribute to the realization of the 2030 Agenda. The dialogue will address different factors required to prompt the desired sustainable transformation, such as new partnerships among different stakeholders and across different sectors as well as shifts in mentalities, attitudes and behaviours.

The co-Chairs will present the key messages from the thematic discussions. The complete co-Chairs’ summary of the discussions will be finalized by the secretariat in consultation with the co-Chairs after the meeting.