IWDA meets Australia’s Ambassador for Women and Girls this International Women’s Day

This morning IWDA CEO Joanna Hayter and Director of Research, Policy and Advocacy Dr Caroline Lambert met with Dr Sharman Stone, the new Ambassador for Women and Girls, to discuss Australia’s strategic commitment to women’s rights.

Dr Stone, Ms Hayter and Dr Lambert spoke about the global surge of commitment to gender equality around the world, and shared their goals for governments, private sectors, women’s rights orgs and cultural institutions to put women as human at the heart of their work.

We shared stories and statistics with the Ambassador about the work we do. We talked about how IWDA makes meaningful change in individual women’s lives but also works to change inequitable structures of power in Australia, in the region and the world. We shared with Dr Sharman Stone the work of our incredible partner organisations, making change on the ground in the Asia and Pacific region: Areas in which, representations of women in parliament can be as low as 2%.

We discussed the Individual Deprivation Measure, the work IWDA is doing with the Australian National University and the Australian Government through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. We discussed how this work breaks new ground in the way we understand deprivation and has the potential to support the measurement of the Global Goals for Sustainable Development. The IDM presently provides direct alignment with 25% of the 53 of the gender-related indicators, and offers a relevant complementary tool to support better targeting of policies and programs.

We agreed that the Australian Aid Program is crucial in our region, and emphasised the importance of an ongoing and central gender focus for this work.

Last but not least, we discussed the upcoming Commission on the Status of Women in New York and Australia’s vital leadership role in this space, particularly when it comes to promoting women’s human rights, sexual and reproductive health and rights, promoting women in all their diversities and promoting women human rights defenders.