On 21 September 2023, during the 78th UN General Assembly, UN Women held its annual HeForShe Summit at Gotham Hall in New York. The theme was "respectfully disruptive": what men can do, at work and in their own lives, to move gender equality forward. The programme starts at 41:28 in the video.
Progress, and a backlash among young men
UN Women Executive Director Sima Bahous opened the summit, hosted by MSNBC anchor Richard Lui. In nine years, she said, the HeForShe call has reached 600 million people, and its corporate champions have raised the share of women on their boards to at least 40%. Then came the worrying part. In a survey supported by UN Women, 58% of young men aged 16 to 19 said men make better political leaders than women, and nearly one in four said it is sometimes acceptable to hit a partner. She asked men to call out misogynist behaviour when they see it, and to put intersectionality at the heart of the campaign as it nears its tenth anniversary.
What companies are doing
Michael Roberts, CEO of HSBC USA, said the pay gap is mostly a matter of representation: the more women in senior roles, the smaller the gap. HSBC requires women on every shortlist and checks promotions with data. His hardest problem is attrition among mothers, often caused by small remarks from male colleagues ("you're leaving early again?"). Maha AlQattan, of DP World, gave an example from the port of Jebel Ali: once crane operation was automated and moved to a control room, women took more than 90% of the crane driver jobs at Terminal 3. For Nompilo Morafo, of MTN, it comes down to will. Yet fewer than 30% of the graduates of one of MTN’s digital skills academies in Africa were women. Diego Juárez Ruiz, a student at Tec de Monterrey, explained how his team got the university to listen: they dropped slogans for data, from a survey on gender-based violence that gathered the testimony of about 6,000 students.
Bias in artificial intelligence
On the panel moderated by Sasha Luccioni of Hugging Face, Leonardo Nicoletti of Bloomberg News described his team's test of the image generator Stable Diffusion. Asked for "judge", it drew women in 3% of images, while more than 30% of US judges are women. Women with darker skin almost never appeared for well-paid jobs, but often did for "fast food worker" or "social worker". Maya, a Harvard student, recalled Porcha Woodruff, arrested in 2023 while eight months pregnant after a false facial recognition match. Joakim Reiter, of Vodafone, said his company wrote AI ethics principles after using machine learning in Africa, and asked governments for guardrails. Joy Buolamwini, founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, warned that old systems stay in use long after new versions are announced.
Men, boys and masculinity
Rupi Kaur performed an unpublished poem written for the summit, "To believe in equality". On the last panel, Rachel Lowenstein recalled that her brother spent more than ten years in "red pill" online spaces. Christine Emba, of The Washington Post, said many young men told her they no longer know what being a man means, and that "manfluencers" like Andrew Tate fill the gap. Richard Reeves, of the American Institute for Boys and Men, a self-described feminist, said the real problems of boys and men have to be addressed before they turn into grievances. He noted that men went from 33% of US teachers in 1980 to 23% today. Michelle Terry, CEO of Movember, recalled that men are three to four times more likely than women to die by suicide. All agreed that equality is not a zero-sum game. Pianist Chloe Flower closed the summit.