With the announcement of the new UN gender entity, UN Women, four years of hard work by women's rights activists came to fruition. The Gender Equality Architecture Reform (GEAR) Campaign coordinated the efforts of over 300 human rights and women's rights groups, including MADRE, to make this new entity a reality. UN Women combines the previously disjointed and ill-funded UN groups working on women's rights into a single, more effective agency. Now we are looking at a possible launch date of September 2010.
There are issues that will need to be worked through in order to make UN Women an effective tool for women's rights. At the press conference held at the UN last Friday, many of these questions came up: What in the mandate will make it stronger than previous UN bodies working on women's empowerment? How will it be financed? How will the Under-Secretary to lead the agency be chosen? Paula Donovan, the co-director of AIDS-Free World, described herself as "cautiously overjoyed," and the advocates who have worked so long on this are keeping up the momentum to make sure a strong and powerful agency emerges.
But, with all these substantive issues to be addressed, the New York Times coverage of all this by Neil MacFarquhar missed the point. An article titled "A UN Agency for Women? Yes! But Those Names..." devotes well over half of its text to poking fun at the haggling over the agency's name:
A certain hallowed ritual around the United Nations holds that to ensure a truly auspicious beginning, any new branch of the world body needs a really first-rate acronym.
So the new umbrella organization for women, which was unanimously approved by the General Assembly on Friday after years of haggling, seemed off to a rocky start, given that its acronym would be Unegeew.
That shorthand stands for the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. It borders on being unpronounceable, and as some indigenous wags pointed out, ends with a rather unfortunate “eew” sound.
Let's hope that when UN Women launches, the US's newspaper of record will have more to say.
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