The United Nations and the real interests of females

The latest available Sustainable Development Goal data show that the world is not on track to achieve gender equality by 2030. Astoundingly, it “may take another 286 years to close the global gender gap.” So reads an announcement from UN Women—a United Nations entity that claims to work in the interest of women. The statement was released at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January.

It’s easy to roll your eyes over the ludicrous specificity (286 years!) of the report’s projections. And, as is customary with international goalsetting, sections of the UN Women’s Sustainable Development Goals report read like John Lennon’s “Imagine.” The report uses headings like “No Poverty” and “Zero Hunger” as though international bureaucrats could wave a social media campaign over such intractable and complex problems and make them disappear.

The proponents behind UN Women and the Generation Equality initiative believe they’re doing something serious and virtuous and that they are leading a project that should attract universal support. But, as constructed, their project is deeply flawed.

To be sure, faithful Christians should occasionally find common cause with secular internationalist feminists. We grieve over, pray about, educate on, and take action against evils like sexual violence, female genital mutilation, and child marriage. But the UN Women’s Gender Equality initiative has several problems woven into its DNA.

First, the UN SDG report ignores the distinct possibility that—on an individual basis—women and girls don’t desire precise parity with their male counterparts when it comes to science, technology, engineering, and math—or even the joys and sacrifices of corporate leadership. As dozens of scientific studies have stated and millions of relationships have affirmed, men’s and women’s brains differ from each other, as do their interests and goals. Perhaps international agencies should spend less time and money pretending that men and women are interchangeable. By assuming that equality exists only where precise parity with men is achieved, the UN is using the goals men pursue to measure the achievements of women. This is backwards.

Second, and more seriously, the organization refuses to celebrate and affirm the core contributions women bring to the world through motherhood. In the name of promoting good health and well-being the report reads, “Unsafe abortion is a leading but preventable cause of maternal mortality and morbidity. Today, over 1.2 billion women and girls of reproductive age live in countries and areas with some restrictions on access to safe abortion. 102 million live in places where abortion is prohibited altogether.”

In the name of “​​sexual and reproductive rights,” UN Women euphemistically promotes the dismal regime of death—encouraging women to suppress their fertility and end the lives of their own children in order to achieve health, wealth, and success. As they do so, UN Women remains eerily quiet about sex-based discrimination against little baby girls targeted and aborted in their mothers’ wombs.

Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, UN Women and the Gender Equality Initiative willfully avoid a true definition of what it means to be a woman or a girl, and undermine their entire agenda by doing so. The 2022 SDG report itself remains rather quiet on the matter of definitions. But the Gender Equality initiative and the UN Women’s social media posts paint a clearer picture.

A March 2020 tweet quoted one of the organization’s speakers: “‘Trans women are women at the end of the day. Every woman is a woman. Women are multifaceted, intergenerational, international. They are limitless, formless ... women are the world.’ - @aaronphilipxo, model & disability rights activist.”

Throughout its PR campaigns and social media posts, UN Women endorses the notion that womanhood is a fluid and highly personal construct. But, if being a girl or a woman is truly a “limitless” and “formless” thing—based on personal beliefs rather than objective, biological reality—the entire project of elevating and protecting women begins to fall apart.

For example, if your goal is eliminating violence against women, you can’t honestly promote a worldview that also insists on placing violent men who identify as women on homeless shelter beds or in prison cells near women who have been harassed, beaten, and raped by men. If your goal is a higher ratio of women in C-suite roles, you can’t honestly celebrate or affirm the elimination of the female-only athletics programs that historically have cultivated such leadership skills. If your goal is more women in small business (or a myriad of other public facing roles), you can’t honestly pretend that men should be able to “identify” away SBA loans and other benefits from deserving females.

So, what is a woman? UN Women—and a discouraging cohort of other global experts”—seem blind or reluctant to admit the truth. The good news is that we can, and do, know. A woman is an adult female human, an image-bearer of the living God. She is different from man, and those differences have often left her vulnerable. But, regardless of the UN’s efforts, she remains equal in dignity and value.