{"id":4234,"date":"2018-03-22T09:01:01","date_gmt":"2018-03-22T15:01:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.elca.org\/worldhunger\/?p=4234"},"modified":"2018-03-21T14:40:37","modified_gmt":"2018-03-21T20:40:37","slug":"united-nations-62nd-commission-status-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.elca.org\/worldhunger\/united-nations-62nd-commission-status-women\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflection on the United Nations’ 62nd Commission on the Status of Women"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In March 2018, the 62nd session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women <\/a>(CSW62) brought together leaders from around the world. Established in 1946, the CSW is the principal international intergovernmental body dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women. The annual session is the largest UN gathering each year. This year, CSW62 focused on rural women and, specifically, two themes:<\/em><\/p>\n

Priority Theme: Challenges and opportunities in achieving gender equality and the empowerment of rural women and girls; and<\/em><\/p>\n

Review Theme: Participation in and access of women to the media, and information and communications technologies and their impact on and use as an instrument for the advancement and empowerment of women (agreed conclusions<\/a>\u00a0of the forty-seventh session).<\/em><\/p>\n

Below, guest writer Angela Marie Dejene, president of Dejene Communications, reflects on these themes, her time at CSW62, and the critical importance of narrative – “truth told well.”<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Even in the United States in 2018, women still face very different challenges and live very different lives than men.<\/p>\n

But the stories the media has told, until very recently, have rarely reflected those female narratives and the daily inequalities with which they struggle.<\/p>\n

I am the granddaughter of South Dakota farmers, and I grew up on the prairie in Crookston, Minnesota \u2013 a farm town of fewer than 8,000 people in the far-away northwest corner of the state.<\/p>\n

You knew you were getting close to reaching the edge of town when you started to smell the odor of rotten eggs from the sugar beet plant.<\/p>\n

Health complaints from local mothers were ignored \u2013 it was and still is a mostly male world in the sugar beet plant and in the fields \u2026 and only the local land-grant university had a greater impact on the local economy.<\/p>\n

The local newspaper, the Crookston Times<\/em>, reflected the male-dominated agricultural industry mostly when I was young \u2013 and still does today.\u00a0The front page story<\/a> last Wednesday featured a meeting of the Mid-Valley Grain cooperative and showed a group shot of male-farmer members.<\/p>\n

My grandmother held up \u201chalf the sky\u201d on that remote South Dakota farm where my mother grew up and where I spent wonderful summers as a young girl. But where is that female narrative if I don\u2019t find it \u2026 if I don\u2019t tell it?<\/p>\n

Without truth-telling narratives, there is rarely progress.<\/p>\n

Progress for women in rural northwestern Minnesota remains bleak today:<\/p>\n