There is “much work to do” to improve solidarity for women in government leadership roles across the world, Scotland’s First Minister has said.
At an event jointly sponsored by the Scottish Government and UN Women during Cop26 in Glasgow, Nicola Sturgeon launched a joint declaration stressing the importance of female leadership in the fight against climate change and gender inequality.
The statement was supported by Ms Sturgeon, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas; Samia Suluhu Hassan, the president of Tanzania; and Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister of Bangladesh, all of whom spoke at the same event as the First Minister.
Ms Sturgeon said: “To be blunt, I think while many of us are working within our domestic settings to empower women, to put women around the decision-making tables and to make sure women’s voices are heard more loudly, I don’t think that is happening in enough countries sufficiently across the world.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon speaks during an event at the WWF stand in the Delegates Pavilion during the Cop26 summit at the Scottish Event Campus (SEC) in Glasgow.
Jane Barlow
And she added: “I’m not sure yet we are exercising the level of global solidarity that we could do that would then give us all added impetus and added support in order to drive forward what we’re doing.”
Ms Sturgeon went on to stress the importance of encouraging women into grassroots, political activism in helping more attain higher political office.
“The work we’re all doing, that we’ve heard expressed here today is important, but we must make that more than the sum of its parts by learning from each other, by supporting each other, by building the links and the bridges between each other and fundamentally by working to make sure that in five, 10, 20 years, the photograph of the world leaders taken at an event like this looks very different to how it looks today,” she said.
“That is not simply at that level, that percolates right down to the grassroots and from the grassroots up because we won’t get to the level of world leaders unless we start empowering women at the grassroots level as well.
“I think on the global solidarity level we have much, much work still to do.”
Ms Kallas said just 10 of the 140 world leaders attending the vital summit in Glasgow were women.
“This is a big problem because, I’m not saying women make better politicians than men, but we have different life experiences,” she said.
“In order to have balanced decisions we need to have both genders represented.”
Ms Hasina said women were more likely to be in part-time or low-paid work, making their voices less likely to be heard in the fight against climate change, but her government was “fully committed to making sure that women are part of the solutions by creating space for them to contribute to all aspects of sustainable development”.
While President Hassan said she would like to see “firm action” taken by world leaders and governments as a result of the summit “because if we don’t, the impacts are impacting women and young girls more”.
