Chelsea Clinton’s INBOUND 2015 keynote reflects on global gender equality, marking the 20th anniversary of Hillary Clinton’s Beijing speech and presenting the Full Participation Report (launched with partners including the Gates Foundation, UN, World Bank, Facebook) to compile data on women’s rights and opportunities. She highlights persistent barriers: child marriage, gender-based violence, unequal access to technology, and the global refugee crisis, noting progress but emphasizing unfinished work both globally and in the U.S.
Questions this video answers
The 20th anniversary of her mother's speech in Beijing.
The Full Participation Report, launched in March.
The Gates Foundation (Melinda Gates), the United Nations, the World Bank, Facebook, telecom companies.
More than 700 million women.
More than 140 million girls.
Chapters
Oh, thank you. Good morning. Thank you to Dan for welcoming me. It is very humbling to follow Malala. Thank you to everyone at Inbound and all the super fans for hosting me this morning. Thank you to everyone at the Boston Convention center for welcoming me so warmly. I thought I would share a little bit about what I'm particularly excited to work on this year. I know that Inbound is really focused on helping each of you share what you're most excited about and collaborate with each other. So I thought I would share a little bit about what I am really excited about. This month marks the 20th anniversary of a speech that my mother gave in Beijing, which shouldn't have been so controversial at the time, but was incredibly provocative when she declared that women's rights are human rights and human rights are women's rights. I wish that that weren't still provocative today, but still in much of the world, it is. As we thought about this month being the 20th anniversary of her speech, we reached out to Melinda Gates and the Gates foundation to. To see if we could do something a little ambitious and a little bit audacious. Could we bring together the most data ever around the status of rights and opportunities for women and girls over the last 20 years to really understand where we'd made progress to approaching and hopefully actually realizing women's rights as human rights, and where maybe we hadn't made as much progress. And so we did that. We reached out to the United nations and the World bank, some less conventional development partners like Facebook, because it has the largest female population in the world, telecom companies and others. And we launched a report in March that we called the Full Participation Report, because really, we want to see a world where every girl like my daughter Charlotte, and every woman like those of us that are a little bit older than Charlotte can be anything that we want to be, that we can stretch the limits of our ambitions and our talents and our work ethic. That's not the world we live in yet. The good news is that we've made some progress, but we're not there yet. So what does that mean? Well, often when we talk about ceilings in this country, we talk about the pay gap and ceilings that inhibit a woman's ability to stretch to the limits of her education or professional aspirations. And those are very real, and we'll talk about those in a little bit. But for so many young women and girls around the world, the ceilings are what Malala faces. The ceilings are the expectations or the realities of not being able to go to school or of getting married as A girl. There are more than 700 million women around the world today who were married before the age of 18. And although we've made a lot of progress in the last 20 years, as more and more countries have made illegal to force a girl to marry, still more than 140 million girls are expected to be married before their 18th birthday by 2020. So we've made real progress, but we still have a long ways to go and we actually still have work to do in this country to ensure that our laws reflect what I believe our values to be, which is that no girl should be forced to be married or even allowed to be married. And we're in Massachusetts right now, and in Massachusetts it's actually legal for a girl to be married at 12 if courts and her parents consent. Not if she consents, but if courts and her parents consent. It's the lowest age in the country. Although it hasn't been enforced in a really long time, the laws on the books matter. And I think it's important for us as Americans to recognize that when we talk about child marriage in other countries and working to eliminate it, we still have unfinished business in this country as well. Another major ceiling and barrier that so many women face around the world is that of gender based violence. One in three women worldwide has been sexually assaulted or sexually intimidated. That is unacceptable in the 21st century. We know that's not only morally reprehensible, it's also a major drag on economies. So the. So this is such a classic example of ensuring that protecting women isn't just the right thing to do, but it's a smart thing to do. Think about all of that lost potential. If a woman is recovering from being beaten, she's not working, she's not imagining, she's not dreaming, she's not contributing to the future of her economy. Another major ceiling that probably seems somewhat strange in this room where I read that there were 84,000 tweets since last year during Inbound over four days, is that there are still hundreds of millions of women around the world, particularly in the developing world, who don't have access to any technology because it's seen as unseemly because of cultural suspicions that women might find out too much, might have too much of a voice or too much agency if they actually had access to a cell phone or the Internet. So we take for granted kind of technology being universal in this country, because in many ways it is. More than 90% of Americans have access to some type of online device, but that's not the reality for much of the developing world, particularly women and girls. And this is an area that Malala is focused on ensuring that not only girls get into school, but girls get into school in a way that is connected literally with the 21st century. Another challenge that is acute at this moment in time is that we have the largest refugee crisis ever. We have more refugees today than even after World War II. That's not something any of us should be proud of, and I think it's something all of us need to feel a responsibility for, at least paying attention to and supporting efforts to ensure that we never see another image like.
