Our former Deputy Executive Director, Karin Sham Poo has advised me that the Beijing meeting which took place in 1995 was the 4th World Conference on Women. The Beijing Platform for Action was seen as the most thorough document ever produced by a UN conference on the subject of women's rights and it incorporated the accomplishments of prior conferences and treaties.
1st World Conference on Women took place in Mexico in 1975.
2nd World Conference on Women took place in Copenhagen in 1980
3rd World Conference on Women took place in Nairobi in 1985.
In some respects it is a pity that the fourth global conference on women was held a decade after the third conference. Of course, there have been many meetings concerning women issues in the interim, including the new UN initiative to ending gender violence, but since many countries are lagging on women's rights issues, it would be in the interest of UNICEF and other organizations interested in fostering women's rights to push for more frequent meetings to mandate equal rights for women in each and every country of the world and issue stamps to commemorate those pledges or any achievements thereof. Since gender equality had got a drop in the funding bucket it would be better to have a World Conference on Women at three year intervals, at least. In some countries and societies, men erect barriers to the advancement of the girl-child and women. What women's conferences need to address is that country laws should change giving equal rights to women. UNICEF's programming experiences have shown that when women have equal rights that children stand to benefit.
