Julie Ward's Message

As we highly value and recognize your role in promoting gender equality, raising awareness against bias and urging cities and towns to take action for equality, we would like to kindly request you to send us a message of solidarity celebrating women’s leadership in these unprecedented times. Your message in video format or written will be posted on our website & social media.

It is indeed striking that women in cities make most of the front line in the fight against COVID-19. WHO research tells us that 70% of healthcare workers around the world are women. Women have demonstrated strong leadership and participation in combating the current pandemic as frontline workers in essential services, caregivers, community organizers and innovators to build capacity and resilience in the face of Covid-19. But unfortunately women are also bearing the brunt of the pandemic’s impact. The effects on women have been multiple: increased violence and domestic violence in particular, unpaid care duties due to school closures and social distancing measures, unemployment and poverty. Women today continue to make the majority of the world’s poor, have fewer rights and less control over decisions that shape their lives.

In order to raise awareness for gender parity and to strengthen women and girl’s voices for equality and empowerment in an urbanizing world, UEF is seeking inspirational and supportive messages on women and leadership in cities and communities that demonstrate how they are making a difference and changing the local landscape.

How to Participate

Messages can be presented as a short 2-minute video, poetry, short story or song. It will then be shared on our website and social media channels to reach out to a wide audience. Our aim is to empower and enrich women’s leadership and representation in all areas of their life including the right to decision-making, equal pay, equal sharing of unpaid care and domestic work, and the end of violence in all forms against women and girls in cities and towns globally. 

We look forward to your positive response. Please submit your message(s) to Ilda Cordeiro, Programme Manager, at ilda.cordeiro@ueforum.org prior to March 8th. Please also share with us your social media accounts along with your messages, so that we may share the content via social media with you.

Julie Ward

Co-chair of Urban Economy Forum