Elaine Congress, Ph.D., associate dean and professor at the Graduate School of Social Service (GSS) and the institute’s co-founder, noted that the event was being held concurrent with the meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations. In taking the name “The Many Faces of Empowerment,” the GSS conference mirrored the commission’s focus on “women’s full and effective participation and decision-making in public life, as well as the elimination of violence, for achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls,” she said.

To better capture a global outlook, the March 20 virtual evening event was held in partnership with the Sydney School of Medicine at the University of Notre Dame in Australia, where it was already the morning of March 21. Nearly 100 students, academics, and practitioners tuned in to Zoom to view several presentations, including: MSW students Shadequa Hampton and Jolisa Beavers on racial justice, GSS professors Tina Maschi, Smita Dewan, and institute co-chair Sandy Turner on “Feminine Power, Politics. Peace and Prosperity,” and on other subjects that ranged from advocacy to climate change.

Gabrielle Casper, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Notre Dame and a recognized expert on women’s health and violence against women, drew the distinction between gender equality and gender equity.

“Gender equality means equal treatment of women and men in laws and policies and equal access to resources and services within families, communities, and society at large,” she said. “Gender equity means fairness and justice in the distribution of benefits and responsibilities between women and men.”

Casper pointed out that equality means very little without equity. As an example, she cited statistics provided to her by a medical colleague who treated boys and girls after a brutal war in Sierra Leon in which tens of thousands of young women and children were abducted in January 1999. In 2001, the physician found that 83% of the girls he treated had been raped and 39% were gang-raped. Fifty percent were beaten and physically assaulted. Some of the girls, aged 12 to 14, were pregnant. Yet funding at the medical center provided boys and girls equal time of about 20 minutes for medical consultation with doctors, though it was clear that the girls needed far more care. It was equal, but not equitable.

Houry Geudelekian, chair of the NGO Committee on the Status of Women, said she wholeheartedly concurred with Casper’s analysis of equality versus equity, particularly as it relates to intersectionality, where race, class, gender, and other identities overlap. She said problems of equity in the U.S. are exacerbated when race is factored in.

“These problems have been happening since the 1940s, in the ’50s and the ’60s, every decade we keep going back to the same issues that we’re not able to solve,” she said. “So, we need to bring in the racism aspect into gender equality because of the intersectionality. Ageism, sexism, racism, all of the isms that you can imagine should be addressed.”

New York City Council Member Helen Rosenthal agreed that while every issue the city faces, from transportation to jobs to primary care, should be viewed through the lens of equity for women, race should also factor in. She pointed out that 35% of households in New York City are led by a woman of color. One law she sponsored addressed what she referred to as the “most horrible statistic”: Black women are eight times more likely to die of pregnancy-related causes than white women.

She noted that the mayor is a white male, as is the city council speaker. Overall, men make up 73% of the city council, even though women make up 53% of the population. White men are just 16% of the city’s population.

“Public policy would more than likely change if our leadership were more akin to the New York City population,” she said.

In order to attain gender equity, she said that she has had to propose laws that one might not think would be necessary—such as requiring the NYPD Special Victims Unit to be trained in how to speak with survivors of sexual assault, a law which has yet to be implemented, she said.

“That’s the reason why women and LGBTQ non-binary people will still not go to the NYPD,” she said.

Before the city cheered on front-line workers of the pandemic, 85% of the women employed at hospitals had been sexually harassed on the job, she said.

“If you’re a woman of color, you’re much more likely to be sexually harassed and diminished in a variety of ways, so we have to pass legislation to try to fix this,” she said.

She then proposed one potential remedy.

“You know, this June, June 22, we’re going to be having a municipal election,” she said.
“There are three terrific women who are running for mayor and there are a lot of women running in the local City Council races.”

A look at that convention as well as three other U.N.-related anniversaries—the first for the Global Compacts on Migration and Refugees, the 20th for the passage of the Security Council Resolution 1325, which addressed the specific impacts of armed conflict on women and girls and the 23rd of the Fourth World Conference on Women: Action for Equality, Development and Peace held in Beijing, were the major themes at a conference titled  “Why the U.N. Matters,” held at Fordham Law School on Nov. 25. 

The conference was organized by the Fordham Institute for Women and Girls, the Fordham Graduate School of Social Service, and the International Health Awareness Network (IHAN). GSS and IHAN also sponsored a student essay contest, and the top two student papers were presented at the event.

Yung Hsien Ng Tam, MSW ’21, a foundation year student in the program, who has been placed at OHEL Children’s Home and Family Services, presented her paper titled, “The 1995 Beijing Conference on Women: Progress and Challenges for Women”.

Sydney Boyer MSW ’20, an advanced student in the program, who is placed at the Unitarian Universalist United Nations Office, presented her essay on “The Forgotten In Global Policy.”

The conference also featured presentations from Sandra Turner, Ph.D., director of the Women and Girls Institute at GSS, Marciana Popescu, Ph.D., professor in the Fordham Graduate School of Social Service, on the global compact for safe, regular, and orderly migration, Jourdan Williams, the director of global policy and advocacy for the International Health Awareness Network on the U.N.’s security resolution on women, peace, and security; and Dr. Sorosh Roshan, founding president of IHAN, who discussed what it was like to be at the Women’s Action conference in Beijing. 

The event examined the initiatives, treaties, and resolutions that came out of those U.N. events and detailed the issues that still exist and the work that still needs to be done.

A look at challenges for migrants, refugees

In light of the one-year anniversary of the Global Compacts on Migration and Refugees, Eleanor Acer, LAW ’88, director of the Refugee Protection Program, Human Rights First, shared her experiences seeing “the impact of the failure to uphold human rights protections, particularly with respect to women and girls, as well as others, who are seeking U.S. refugee protection at our borders as we speak today.” 

Acer said that she and her colleagues “spent an awful lot of time over the past year visiting women, children, and other asylum seekers at our borders … as well as in immigration detention facilities around the country.”

“At the border, the Trump administration has worked to ban and block refugees from seeking protection at the U.S., turning them back to Mexico through a number of different policies, and now some of you may have heard of some reports of people being sent back to Guatemala or to Honduras and El Salvador,” she said.

Acer, who received the Louis J. Lefkowitz Award for Public Service from Fordham Law in 2007, said that this made those seeking refuge susceptible to attacks

“Many of the areas that the Trump administration is turning people back to are essentially ruled by cartels,” she said. “Refugees and migrants and women and children in particular are very vulnerable to being targeted. There have been reports of kidnappings, attacks, sexual assaults of asylum seekers and migrants all across the border.”

Acer said that her organization has been working since 1978 to “push the U.S. government to be a strong voice for human rights around the world and here at home to live up to our own human rights obligations.”

“Needless to say, these days our challenges are greater than ever,” she said. 

Human rights at the local level

Geeta Tewari, the associate director of the Urban Law Center at Fordham Law School, said that cities, particularly New York City, could lead the way in adopting some of the human rights goals that championed equality.

“New York is one of the most powerful cities in the world … I cannot emphasize enough how much of a moral obligation our city has, given that the city is a leader in finance, fashion, medicine, and art,” she said. “We can serve as a model to other cities, for how we treat people, how we value our citizens and their rights as human beings.”

Tewari said that because gender equality was specifically stated as one of the “17 Sustainable Development Goals” from the U.N. for this year, it was essential that cities like New York lead the way in that area.

Aid for children in war areas

Children who are living in war or disaster areas should also be a focus for the international community, according to Laura Perez, the Helen Hamlyn Senior Fellow at Fordham’s Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs.

About one in four children currently live in a country affected by conflict or disaster, said Perez. More than 50 million children migrated across borders or have been displaced by conflict from 2005 to 2015, Perez said, highlighting a 2016 report from UNICEF. This can have devastating long-term effects.

“Refugee children forced from their homes are five times more likely to be out of school than other children,” she said. 

Next steps for gender equality

In an effort to continue the work brought about by the featured U.N. conferences, Houry Geudelekian, who chairs the Non-Governmental Organization Committee on the Status of Women (NGO-CSW/NY), spoke of her organization’s efforts in working with the “Generation Equality Movement,” which aims to put together the “most comprehensive blueprint to achieve women’s empowerment and gender equality.” 

The goal is to bring together stakeholders from across the world and gather their ideas on six major themes that impact equality for women: environmental protection, freedom from violence and stigma, poverty eradication, inclusive development, peaceful societies, and gender-responsive institutions. Through both online and in-person events in France and Mexico in 2020, the effort aims to “chart an agenda of concrete action to realize gender equality before 2030.”