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| Review of UNESCO's Work on Gender One of the greatest achievements of the last fifty years has been the expansion of women's rights to include citizenship and suffrage. The widespread growth of the women's movement and the challenging questions posed by feminists have altered the roles of women and affected public debates in almost every corner of the globe. |
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The assertion that women's rights are human rights has transformed public debate surrounding this issue. Governments have shifted their views of women's rights from something that was generally seen as a need into something that governments have an obligation to protect, promote, and fulfil. This shift in the way that women's rights are perceived has resulted in seeing women's issues as public, social issues instead of private, individual problems. Viewing the abuse of women as simply a private concern has changed to become an important public issue that intimately affects half of the world's population. Equality, development and peace have been embraced by the UN as the framework for women's rights since 1975, but it has only been in the last 10 years that women's rights have been recognized as human rights. This has consequently given rise to the concept of women's human rights. At the latest United Nations Conference for Women, the Beijing Conference in 1995, it was therefore firmly established that women's rights are human rights and that gender equality is central to progress in development and democracy.
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