Keynote Remarks at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s International Women’s Day Forum

As delivered

Good morning. I am so pleased to join this gathering of leaders from the private, academic, philanthropic, and public sectors. Thank you so much to Executive Director Shanique Streete, Vice President Marc DeCourcey, and the entire Foundation team for bringing us together.

This is actually my very first official International Women’s Day engagement in my capacity as U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues. While I’ve only been at the U.S. State Department for nine months, my personal and professional passion for promoting the rights and empowerment of women and girls has defined the four decades of my career.

And so, I would like to use my time with you today to take stock of where we are in the global effort to foster women’s empowerment and advance gender equality, share some examples of how my office is supporting this effort, and finally, highlight ways in which the business community, philanthropy and civil society can, and I would argue, must play a role to build that road of opportunities for women and girls globally.

Let me start with three really important facts:

First, no country in the world has achieved full gender equality or parity, though some have done much better than others.

Second, the COVID pandemic and the increasing number of conflicts and the political instability around the world have set back decades of progress in achieving gender equality.

Third, research has consistently demonstrated that empowering women and girls benefits them but it also benefits economies – boosting economic growth, fostering innovation and increasing resilience and stability. This is as true for nation states as it is for private sector companies. On average, companies with the highest percentages of female board members outperform those with the smallest percentage by up to 66 percent. So, for all of us and the businesses or organizations we lead, empowering women is the smart way forward.

This month will have no shortage of panels, talks, events, and celebrations of “women’s empowerment,” so it’s important to kick of the month with an understanding of what we mean by this term. I see it as the process by which those who have historically been denied the ability to make strategic life choices claim this ability – in other words empowering women means enabling them to have the agency to make decisions and act upon them, whether that’s to be able to finish school, to be able to own property, or to be able to enter and stay in a chosen career.

Our job as the U.S. government, and as philanthropic and private sector leaders is to create an enabling environment for women to become empowered. The four ingredients necessary for this are:

First, to strengthen women’s own capabilities;

Second, build additional opportunities;

Third, guarantee women and girls safety; and

Fourth, ensure women have a voice and platforms for leadership to shape their own, their community’s and their country’s destiny.

The first element, capability, is about building women’s capacities by improving their education and health status. Let me focus on education here.

Globally, we have been fairly successful in closing the gender gap in enrollment in primary school but still have a distance to go to achieve the same in secondary education. According to the World Economic Forum’s 2023 Global Gender gap Index, it will take 16 years to close the gender gap in education across the globe. The gender gap is particularly stark in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM fields of study. Data show that women make up almost half of total employment across non-STEM occupations, but less than 30 percent of all STEM workers, in large part due to a lack of educational opportunities in these fields.

The U.S. government is working to bridge these gaps, providing women with the education and digital skills to match today’s labor market.

One effort I’d briefly highlight that my office helps lead is the U.S.-India Alliance for Women’s Economic Empowerment, a public-private partnership through which the U.S. government and outside partners – perhaps some of you in this room -are stimulating women’s and girls’ interest in STEM careers from an early age by partnering with member companies to connect private sector mentors in STEM with Indian women and girl mentees.

Likewise, as we announced just yesterday at the Summit for the Alliance for Afghan Women’s Economic Resilience, we are rolling out an initiative with member companies Coursera, Microsoft, and Meta together with Qatar’s Education Above All Foundation to provide access to online vocational upskilling for hundreds of thousands of Afghan women inside and outside of Afghanistan.

While education is necessary, women also need equal access to economic opportunity — to apply their basic capabilities through access to jobs and entrepreneurship.

According to a 2015 McKinsey Global Institute report, women’s equal labor force participation could add over $28 trillion to global GDP in 2025. Yet, the World Economic Forum notes that at the current rate of progress, it will take over 267 years to reach gender parity in the economy. That’s simply unacceptable.

Since the launch of our first-ever Strategy on Global Women’s Economic Security last year, the U.S. government has committed to advancing investment in breaking down barriers to achieving parity.

One major piece of this puzzle is women’s role as care providers—both paid and unpaid. In most societies, women are the primary caretakers of children, the elderly, the disabled and the sick. In fact, women perform 76 percent of all unpaid care work—three times the amount as men. That care work is critically important to global economic prosperity, and yet still remains undervalued and unrecognized.

That’s why one of our flagship initiatives is our partnership with the World Bank’s Invest in Childcare Initiative, with the potential to invest $180 million in care infrastructure in low and middle-income countries.

We are also using our foreign assistance dollars to build the capacity of women entrepreneurs and increase their access to global markets.

For example, another one of our major projects, called WE-Champs, supports women’s chambers of commerce and business associations across 25 countries in Europe, Central Asia, and West Africa. The project strengthens services for women entrepreneurs and addresses barriers to their economic participation by building their organizational capacity and management expertise, as well as expanding their regional networks.

The third essential component of empowerment is safety, or reduced vulnerability to, and protection from, violence and conflict.

Gender-Based Violence, or GBV, includes violence in times of war and in times of peace – in both private and public spaces – within the home and on the street and now, increasingly online. More than 1 in 3 women worldwide experience intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence in their lifetime. Some of the violence and harassment that women experience happens in public transportation and in workplaces and yes, increasingly online.

85 percent of women who are online have experienced or witness violence online, because technology is a double-edged sword. It holds enormous potential for advancing education and employment opportunities, but the misuse of social media platforms and other digital technologies has also given rise to new and extremely pervasive forms and manifestations of GBV.

Online harassment or abuse, or what we call Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV) is one of the biggest barriers to women’s and girls’ political and civic participation — and it is having real impact on women’s careers, too. When I was in Kenya last summer, I met with a group of women journalists who identified TFGBV as the biggest threat to their careers – and the biggest reason why they would urge younger women NOT to pursue them.

Gender based violence, no matter how and where it occurs, is a gross violation of women’s human rights as well as an enormous barrier to all forms of participation, including in the economic sphere.

It also has serious physical and mental health consequences that are both immediate and intergenerational.

It is not surprising then that gender-based violence has an economic cost for societies. In 2016, the global cost of violence against women was estimated at 2 percent of global GDP, or $1.5 trillion.

To prevent and respond to gender-based violence, the U.S. government is taking decisive action through programming, policy, and diplomatic efforts.

For example, during the 16 Days of Activism Against GBV in December our Embassies around the world participated in innovative programming, advocacy work, trainings, and media engagements – all to raise awareness of GBV and find locally-led solutions to ending GBV globally.

To address safety in transportation, we have started gathering information from cities and organizations around the world to learn what local governments and municipalities are doing to address women’s safety in public transit.

Simultaneously, we are leaning into countering online harassment and abuse through our leadership of the Global Partnership for Action on Gender-Based Online Harassment and Abuse, which works with 14 governments, international organizations, survivors, civil society, and importantly, the private sector, to better understand, prevent, and address technology facilitated gender-based violence. Altogether, we have invested over $7 million in programs around the world focused on preventing and responding to TFGBV.

The final ingredient for women’s and girls’ empowerment is voice and leadership.

A recent report from the UN found that, at the current rate, it will take 140 years for women to be represented equally in positions of power and leadership in the workplace.

Despite the data that I cited earlier that shows that a larger number of women in leadership roles leads to higher profits for businesses, women make up only 6 percent of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies.

To advance women’s economic leadership, the U.S. government is promoting public-private partnerships including the women’s economic councils I mentioned earlier in India, Afghanistan and also in Pakistan. I was so pleased to see some of you last August at the APEC Women and the Economy Forum, and grateful for the partnership and commitments that U.S. companies made not only then but throughout the entire U.S. host year – showcasing U.S. leadership in increasing women’s economic security and global prosperity.

As you may be tracking, during the APEC Economic Leaders’ Week, Vice President Harris announced a new initiative called Women in the Sustainable Economy (WISE), which aims to bolster women’s economic leadership globally by expanding access to employment, training, and financial resources in the emerging blue and green industries. The initiative has already garnered $1.4 billion in commitments from governments, civil society, and the private sector.

This initiative is an example of our intensified efforts to support women leaders in climate-related sectors, in particular.

We face serious challenges in the area of women’s political representation as well. According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, less than 1/3 of parliamentarians across the globe are women. And in 2022, the overall number of women representatives grew at the smallest rate in six years (0.4 percent).

And yet we know that the full and meaningful participation of women in political, peace, and security-related decision-making processes leads to better and more sustainable outcomes. Studies show that a peace agreement is 35 percent more likely to last at least 15 years when women are involved.

Through these efforts and more, the Secretary’s Office of Global Women’s Issues is committed to creating an enabling environment for women and girls to take control of their destinies.

I am awed and inspired by the women and girls I have met throughout my career, whose courage and tenacity have gotten us this far.

But the increased attention to the global gender equality movement has brought with it new threats as well. As we forge ahead, we find ourselves up against a well-financed, well-coordinated effort to undo decades of consensus and multi-sector cooperation to build our road together.

We need to stand together across all sectors to emphasize that gender equality is critical for sustainable peace and prosperity, for the democracies on which all of our businesses, representation and lives depend.

And so, let me conclude with a call to action:

Chambers of Commerce have a key role to play in bringing together women-owned businesses for networking and skills building opportunities. We see this day in and day out with our project, We-Champs. Your convening power is immense; your credibility unmatched. I implore you to use it – and to call on me, on my office, and on our embassies around the world to help in any way possible.

For our civil society leaders and philanthropists in the room, your voices, advocacy, funding, and identification of the best ways to break down these challenges is essential. Hold all of us to account.

For the academics in the groom, keep gathering the data to demonstrate that investing in gender equality is just that—an investment, not an expenditure—an investment with a high rate of return.

For our private sector colleagues, I will keep it simple — promote women to leadership and management roles! Whether that’s helped along by pay equity policies, relieving care burdens, investing in STEM training, sourcing from women-owned businesses – or joining us in India, Pakistan, or to support the women of Afghanistan – we are ready and willing partners.

This is the road – to capability, to opportunity, to safety, and to leadership – for all of us, to be built by all of us. Thank you.