UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Monday that “equality” between men and women worldwide is an increasingly distant goal, which will be achieved “in 300 years at best”.

“Gender equality is getting further and further away. At the current rate, the UN Women’s Organization (UNIFEM) predicts that it will be reached in 300 years,” Guterres said in a speech at the start of discussions in New York of the UN Commission on the Status of Women. of Women (CSW), two days before International Women’s Day.

The secretary general estimated that “all over the world, women’s rights are being harmed, threatened, violated” and that “the progress achieved in the decades is disappearing before our eyes”.

Guterres cited the example of Afghanistan, where, after the Taliban seized power in August 2021, “women and girls disappeared from public life.”

It did not mention other countries by name, but noted that “in many areas women’s reproductive rights are backsliding and school-going girls are at risk of abduction or assault.”

The UN secretary-general did not mention Iran, which was excluded on December 14 from the CSW after a vote by the UN Economic and Social Council (Ecosoc) at the initiative of the US because of the suppression of the rebellion that broke out in September after the death of Mahsa Amini after her arrest by the morality police in Tehran.

“Centuries of patriarchy, discrimination and painful stereotypes have created a gender gap in science and technology,” fields in which women represent just “3 percent of Nobel laureates,” Guterres pointed out as an example.

He paid tribute to the French researcher “Emmanuel Charpentier and the American Jennifer Doudna who historically formed the first group of women to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry three years ago”, in 2020.

“Men’s teams have won it 172 times,” Guterres pointed out.

“The patriarchy is fighting back. U.S. too. I am here to state clearly and forcefully: the UN is everywhere on the side of women and girls,” she concluded.