Pro Mujer was pleased to welcome María Noel Vaeza, Regional Director for the Americas and the Caribbean of UN Women, to the stage at the fourth edition of the GLI Forum LatAm 2023, where she loudly called for the urgency of moving towards gender equality. Her interview with Carmen Correa, CEO of Pro Mujer, inspired and mobilized attendees.
From childhood, girls face cultural stereotypes and gender roles that limit their expectations of what their future might look like.
“When I said I wanted to be a lawyer, I was told I couldn’t. When I said I wanted to work at the United Nations, I was told I wouldn’t make it,” María Noel shared. “The angrier I got, the more I was committed to showing that I could do everything I was being told I couldn’t.” Against all odds, María Noel managed to make her dreams come true, and since 2019, she has been carrying out critical work at a transformative organization. “I feel at home at UN Women because I firmly believe that women’s empowerment, particularly economic empowerment, can eliminate the violence and discrimination and open doors for political change.”
Women like María Noel are leading the way to create a new narrative, building a future with more opportunities for the next generations and a fair and egalitarian society where the word “feminism” is recognized by the purest essence of meaning: “If one looks up the definition of feminist in the dictionary, to be a feminist means advocating for women’s rights,” she said. “I believe there is no one in the world who does not want to defend women’s rights. We’re feminists, and that’s amazing.”
Feminism is about opening the doors to women’s political and economic participation, eliminating gender violence, bringing women into fields where they are underrepresented today, and more.
“We need more women in STEM, more women engineers, more women in decision-making spaces,” said María Noel. “We’ve been waiting for a seat at the table for 2,000 years. We need to create societal and structural systems to make it happen.”
The data and the evidence are irrefutable: we are still far from the equitable and egalitarian context we work for. In Latin America and the Caribbean, women’s labor participation is 23% lower than men’s, and women earn 20% less than men (ILO).
“How can our region grow if we exclude half of the population?” asked María Noel. “Only 51% of women work, and the main reason many are out of the labor market is the burden of care. We need to talk about shared responsibility. We can’t keep doing 3.5 times more unpaid care work than men. In 10 years, the time that men spend on unpaid care work increased by just 7 minutes. Women are still doing eight days of work a week while men do five. Everything is just moving desperately slow.”
María Noel highlighted that the care work that historically falls on women is undoubtedly one of the primary obstacles they face when it comes to achieving autonomy: “Women have higher unemployment rates—16.9% of women are formally unemployed versus 5% for men. With the pandemic, 4 million women left the formal economy because of care work responsibilities. We’re half the population, and we need to demand half of everything. This isn’t because it’s the smart thing to do; it’s purely because we are citizens of society. We need to continue to raise our voices, strongly and urgently, because we cannot accept that we’re still 300 years away from reaching gender equality.”
When thinking about potential solutions and drivers of change, it is necessary to take advantage of available capital to positively impact women and girls. Gender lens investments that evaluate companies based on the number of women in leadership, equality in the workplace, products and services targeting women and girls, and equality in the value chain and advocacy are both socially responsible and financially profitable.
María Noel also emphasized the impact of not including a gender lens, stating, “Companies need to realize that the market doesn’t want products produced by macho, misogynist companies that don’t think about women. They need to understand that this affects their bottom line. And companies that have more women on the board earn more, have higher market values, and are more innovative.”
Gema Sacristán, an expert in gender lens investing, joined the conversation to reflect on the need to attract more agents of change to join the mission.
“It is hard to get investors to recognize the great business opportunity that investing in women represents,” she noted. “Women pay more, save more, and are better marketers. Women founders are much more profitable, but investors are leaving this investment opportunity on the table. I hope it will get easier to demonstrate the amazing business opportunity, because that will lead to more products and more investment.”
The discussion with María Noel Vaeza was inspiring and incredibly well received by the GLI Forum 2023 attendees. These three women are powerful leaders who have pushed us to continue to build a more just Latin America that offers equal opportunities for women.
