1 of 2 | Geeta Rao Gupta is the fourth Ambassador-at-Large for the Secretary’s Office of Global Women’s Issues at the U.S. Department of State. She is the first woman of color to hold the position. Photo courtesy U.S. Department of State/UPI
Oct. 9 (UPI) — Dr. Geeta Rao Gupta will travel to Brazil this week for a “historic” G20 meeting to promote America’s agenda on gender equality, the U.S. Department of State revealed.
On Wednesday, the U.S. State Department announced that Rao Gupta, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues, will head to Brasilia to lead the U.S. delegation at the G20’s “Empowerment of Women Working Group” meeting from Thursday to Friday. There she will advance U.S. gender equality priorities.
Rao Gupta is expected on Thursday to meet with government officials, parliamentarians, civil society, and other local women leaders and experts on U.S.-Brazil efforts to promote gender equality.
On Tuesday at the opening of the working group’s last technical meeting in Brasilia’s Federal District, Brazil’s minister of women called for nations to collaborate toward a “historic” consensus on women’s issues.
“Guaranteeing respect for all women is guaranteeing human dignity,” Brazil’s Minister of Women Cida Gonçalves said at the end of her remarks.
She addressed a wide-range of issues facing women on a global scale.
“It is not possible that women, being the majority of the world’s population, are not recognized, not respected and not included in the main global agendas,” she said.
Gonçalves said “development and the economy” are the “main agendas” of the working group and that is “where we want to be” and what “we’re going to fight for.”
On Friday at the G20’s working group meeting, State Department officials say Rao Gupta, the ex-president of the International Center for Research on Women, will push to advance American priorities on gender-based equality, which include: promoting economic security for women by “supporting the care economy” and “bridging the gender digital divide.”
“That is why this Working Group is so important and fundamental,” Brazil’s minister for women stated. “Because our declaration contributes to the decisions of our countries at the summit. It means that women will be included in these processes.”
The annual G20 meetings are more than just a conference, G20 Brazil recently explained on social media. It’s an international collaborative of the G20’s member nations that involve experts, ministers and world leaders in face-to-face discussions over the course of a year.
According to the State Department, U.S. priorities for this meeting on gender equality will also include increasing the number of women in the labor force, cultivating generational leadership in addressing the growing global climate crisis, and “preventing and responding to gender-based violence,”
Each meeting, G20 Brazil said in a recent X post, is an “important piece in the puzzle that defines the future of the planet.”
The working group on women was created under India’s G20 presidency. Now under Brazil’s leadership, a greater focus has been put on the promotion of diversity.
At April’s meeting earlier this year, the G20 nations came to a “rare” global agreement on gender equality and promotion of diversity during two days of discussions where the G20 theme “Gender Equality and the Promotion of Diversity in the World of Work” had been “scrutinized,” according to the Brazilian government.
That particular working group meeting “was a rare event in the world of multilateral relations in which it was possible to identify convergence on a series of issues presented,” Brazilian Minister of Labor and Employment Luiz Marinho said in April.
According to him, all delegations, member countries and guests were able to present their particularities and challenges related to the topic and discussed possible ways to face the challenges.