Stern students attend UN Women’s HeforShe Summit, form Gender Equality Council on campus

By Kimberly Zhou, Isabel Becerra and Adhya Singh, NYU Stern Council on Gender Equality

To be respectfully disruptive means to challenge the status quo.

This was the message that NYU Stern Community members remembered most when we attended the HeForShe Summit, UN Women’s flagship event during UN General Assembly week. An initiative of UN Women, HeForShe was launched nine years ago as an invitation for men to stand in solidarity with women in pursuit of gender equality. It was a high-level gathering of government leaders, business executives, university students, and community members. The most ambitious of these leaders have joined the HeForShe Alliance as champions, having committed to advancing progress on gender equality over a five-year period.

NYU Stern students at UN Women's HeforShe summit, an event focused on promoting greater gender equality and male allyship.
 

A diverse range of panelists presented on challenging stereotypes in their pursuits of gender equality - all under the theme of being “respectfully disruptive”. UN Women’s Executive, Ms. Sima Bahous, opened the summit with staggering statistics: UN Women found that 58% of men ages 16-19 thought men were better political leaders than women; 1 in 4 men found it acceptable to hit a spouse. Another panelist, university student Diego Alfonso Juarez conducted a 22,000-person survey on gender-based violence to raise awareness about gender equality at his university. The CEO of HSBC, Noel Quinn, committed to having 35% of HSBC’s workforce be women. These leaders realized they could help remedy an existing issue and took a stand to enact change for a more equitable future.  

A second panel examined how generative AI exacerbates the current gender and racial bias found in society. Panelist Leonardo Nicoletti from Bloomberg News, for example, revealed his research on AI imaging which, when asked to produce images of CEOs, produced mainly images of older, white men. For context, 10.4% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. Dr. Joy Buolamwini, computer scientist and digital activist at the MIT Media Lab, remarked that current legacy systems in place do not prioritize fairness and inclusivity: “As we create new systems, we must check on old ones.”

One of the most powerful discussions considered disrupting the narrative on men and boys. The main question: where are men left in the conversation on gender? Though the concept of womanhood has changed drastically over the last few decades, the concept of manhood, and masculine values, have relatively remained the same. Men increasingly seem to be left out and left behind in the gender equality movement. This has led to the rise of dissatisfaction with the feminist movement and thus, the rise of figures such as Andrew Tate– who are incredibly influential with young boys.