The Commission on the Status of Women is the United Nations’ only space dedicated to gender equality. Its annual meeting is the world’s largest gathering of feminist and other Civil Society Organisation (CSO) representatives.

Gender equality advocates in Australia tend to have a low level of engagement with the United Nations-based human rights system. CSOs working on issues of gender equality within Australia tend to have limited engagement with UN processes and do not tend to use human rights terminology to describe their work. This creates a risk that local CSOs will miss out on benefiting from international work on the human rights of women and girls and may result in Australian CSOs inadvertently be recreating work already done elsewhere. It also contributes to a low level of human rights literacy in Australia generally, which in turn makes Australia vulnerable to rhetoric and advocacy which seeks to undermine human rights generally and particularly the rights of women, girls and other people marginalized by gender.

Each year, Equality Rights Alliance leads a seven-month project to provide training and support to women in Australia to attend the annual meeting or to engage remotely from Australia. We provide opportunities to caucus and to connect with international advocacy with the intention of building stronger connections between domestic CSOs and international processes.

In 2024, interest in this year’s 68th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW68) among Australian non-government organisations was the highest it has been for at least twelve years. The group coordinated by Equality Rights Alliance included 130 individuals, comprising representatives from 71 organisations and 16 unaligned experts or individuals. Of the participants, 14 were known to be under 30 years of age and the group also included a range of women with disabilities, Indigenous women, women of colour, women from rural and remote areas, non-binary people and people of diverse genders, women from migrant backgrounds and people of various sexualities. In total, 27 individuals participated in Equality Rights Alliance’s activities for first-time attendees.

In addition to CSOs and individual experts, for the first time this year Equality Rights Alliance provided partnership support to a large delegation of business representatives from Chief Executive Women and the Champions of Change Coalition.

Finally, Equality Rights Alliance’s team of Agreed Conclusions language experts was also the largest yet, with 42 individuals participating in work on the language negotiations and a further eight individuals observing the language negotiations from Australia.

The priority theme for this year’s session was gender equality and empowerment for all women and girls by addressing poverty and strengthening institutions and financing with a gender perspective.

Frustrations about inequitable distribution of resources and power on a global scale simmered throughout the meeting.  There was a robust and at times fraught conversation about conditionalities attached to aid and development funding and the use of loan structures in preference to grants, especially the World Bank’s use of market-based and concessional loans in climate finance. The Global North/Global South divide was strongly apparent. The poverty theme provoked considerable comment about the effect sovereign debt has on the availability of resources for domestic social services and gender transformative initiatives.

This discussion disrupted some of the traditional alliances in the negotiations. There was widespread admiration for the role being played by members of the Pacific Islands Forum in the negotiation room, especially regarding the links between women’s poverty and climate crisis. However, we were shocked to hear a couple of States asserting that they do not feel such a link has yet been demonstrated.

Another emerging theme is the role of men and boys as allies and agents of change, along with other non-traditional partners. A sizable delegation from the Champions of Change Coalition and an active delegation from Chief Executive Women engaged strongly and constructively, in a positive contrast to some of the previous attempts to engage the corporate world at CSW.

Australia’s Minister for Women, Katy Gallagher, was present for the first three days of meetings and made the case for a data and evidence-led approach to policy for gender equality, backed by the release of Working for Women: A National Strategy for Gender Equality. Mary Wooldridge, CEO of the Workplace Gender Equality Agency was also strong on this theme, following the public release of organisational gender wage gap data in February. There was strong interest in Australia’s proactive approach to gender data.