On the 70^th anniversary of the creation of the United Nations' Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), Professor Máiréad Dunne (University College Cork) and Professor Barbara Crossouard (Centre for International Education, University of Sussex) recently contributed to an International Sociology Association panel on Sociological Approaches to Gender Justice at the CSW Non Governmental Organisation Forum in New York. 

Their presentation, entitled … Plus c’est la même chose, highlighted that despite major policy initiatives since CSW was created in1948, closing the global gender gap is still estimated to take 123 years (World Economic Forum, 2025).

They argued that international development efforts to address gender inequalities are constrained by their over-reliance on quantitative comparison and ranking. Importantly, this reproduces a modern gender binary that ignores context, conflates gender, sex and sexuality and misrecognises the work of institutions such as education in the production of the gendered subject. They pointed to the need for deeper understandings of gender that can attend to the banal ways that gendered hierarchies are reproduced in our everyday lives.  

Read more about the UN NGO CSW forum here.

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