A Conversation with Dr. Geeta Rao Gupta, Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, U.S. Department of State

What has surprised you the most during your first year as the Secretary of State’s ambassador at large for Global Women’s Issues? 

Having worked on these issues for four decades, it’s a good perch to have to look at how far we’ve come. On the positive side, the rhetoric on gender equality and women’s rights is much more ubiquitous and people are talking about it a lot more. The right people are speaking about it, raising it as an economic issue and a human rights issue. The disappointment is how little has changed and, in fact, how we are losing some ground. I think what’s most surprising is the speed and extent to which we are being set back and how it is going to affect more than just women. It’s going to affect democracy and all the values that we have espoused: diversity and inclusion; peace, stability, and prosperity. That should alarm everyone. 

 The 2023 UN report on the Sustainable Development Goals says it will take 140 years for women to have equal representation in positions of power and leadership. That’s incredibly disappointing. Another statistic that caught my eye was the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report on female genital mutilation, which said that for us to reach the goal of eliminating it, progress needs to happen almost twenty-seven times faster. Years ago, when I was at UNICEF, we used to say it would only need to be ten times faster.  

It is important to reiterate that gender equality is not a zero-sum game. It’s not an expenditure; it has economic and political returns. When you put money towards it, you are making an investment for the future. It’s an investment for all. 

How do you see the trends in women’s political representation and leadership? 

Women are still grossly underrepresented at all levels of leadership in the government, private sector, security sector, and in even in the peace building processes taking place around the world. We are seeing that around the world, women are still not represented, despite all the evidence to show how effective, and how much more positive and sustainable the outcomes would be if women were involved. The trend making me really nervous is the data from the Interparliamentary Union on the number of parliamentarians: at the moment, women make up less than one-third of parliamentarians across the globe. But in 2023, the number of women representatives increased at the smallest rate in six years—at a rate of only 0.4 percent. The fact that it may be plateauing and may start decreasing is of great concern.  

What measures are you taking to address this stalling rate of progress and the impact of online harassment, abuse, and threats? 

My office is using each of the tools of the Department of State—policies, programs, and diplomacy, which is both bilateral and multilateral—to advance women’s leadership. For example, to address technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV), which includes the gendered sort of disinformation, doxing, harassment, abuse, and threats online to human rights defenders who are women, women leaders, and women parliamentarians, we are leaning in using each of those tools. It is a phenomenon unfortunately that many people are not aware of, or of the damage that it can cause. What is really scary to me is that this problem is so severe that as we travel around the world and talk to women leaders, they are telling us that they would never recommend to a younger generation of women to take up a position of power. 

On the diplomatic front, we have reached out to other countries, UN agencies, civil society organizations, and the private sector to set up a global partnership called the Global Partnership for Action on Gender-Based Online Harassment and Abuse. Fourteen countries have joined hands with us. We are not only trying to understand the phenomenon better, but also to prevent and address it through policy and programming. We’ve held forums to discuss TFGBV, including in partnership with the Council of Foreign Relations, to think about potential solutions to respond to malign state and non-state actors that are using this kind of technology. One effort of the global partnership is to develop a response framework, including a forthcoming rapid response fund to provide small amounts of money to women leaders, particularly in political office or civil society leaders who face this problem, to get the legal help and technology support they need to deal with it in real time. 

The Department of State has already invested almost $7 million in programs focused on documenting, mitigating, preventing, and responding to TFGBV. We co-sponsored an event with Canada, Colombia, and the United Kingdom on the margins of the Commission and the Status of Women, where we announced a new initiative called Women Leading Effective and Accountable Democracy in the Digital Age, or Women LEAD. Also, the United States and the EU Trade and Technology Council released recommendations for online platforms to identify, mitigate, and provide access to remedy for digital attacks targeting human rights defenders more effectively. There’s a lot more to be done in terms of public and private partnerships. 
 
The U.S. government has for the first time used its authorities to sanction alleged perpetrators of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV). What other measures do you think are most effective to prevent and punish these crimes? 

I’m glad you mentioned President Biden’s sanctions because it is important to underscore that this is the first time ever that sanctions were issued for specifically these crimes. I hope we will see more of that because that is the kind of accountability you need to end the impunity. On our recent visit to Colombia, I had a very interesting conversation with one of our 2012 International Women of Courage awardees, a courageous, incredible journalist who has borne enormous torture and horrific abuse to fight for transparency. She said that the narrative that rape is an inevitable outcome of war must change. I’ve been mulling this over a lot. It’s not a military act, it’s a cowardly act and we need to find a way to change the narrative. Countries and their leaders must begin to see it as something they should be truly ashamed of. We must also strengthen services that are trauma-informed and survivor-centered for survivors of CRSV. An example of this is the International Alliance for Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict, which is a forum established by the United Kingdom to bring together governments, civil society actors, and survivors.  

On the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda, you noted that women’s representation in peace negotiations and related decision-making to end conflict remains low, almost a quarter century after UN Resolution 1325. How can its provisions be finally implemented? 

We recently signed Memorandums of Understanding to support two regional centers of excellence in Kosovo and Colombia, and we hope for one in East Asia, too. I think that they offer enormous promise because it is a regional, contextualized effort to share best practices and lessons learned, to provide training, and build capacity to enable the nations of that region to implement their WPS national action plans. I realized soon after taking office that many countries have plans but not all are implemented. Part of the issue is capacity and learning how to implement plans. Also, because security issues include regional and local dimensions, having regional centers makes more sense than having these conversations only at a very high level globally. 

In addition to capacity building, the priority needs to be on money. You need resources, you need staff, you need implementation to make sure that women meaningfully participate in all of these conversations. And to get resources, parliamentarians need to be involved. Last year, we hosted the WPS Focal Points Network with Romania, which brought together parliamentarians to work together and create real possibilities through these national action plans—for example, getting budgets associated with the plans so they can actually be implemented.  

On this issue, there is a lot of bipartisan support in our own Congress. We have the 2017 Women, Peace, and Security Act. We also have a bipartisan WPS Caucus on the Hill that tracks our progress and informs what we are doing at the Department of State and USAID through our foreign assistance and foreign policy, as well as what we are doing through the Department of Defense and domestically through Homeland Security. Right now, Japan is the only other country with an equivalent parliamentary caucus. I think it would be helpful for other countries to implement political mechanisms within their parliaments to promote WPS priorities. Another way is to bring parliamentarians from different countries together periodically to discuss WPS issues so they can be informed and feel ownership of this agenda. 
 
How successful has the U.S. administration has been in mainstreaming its gender equality objectives across the government and in attributing relevant funding to support those objectives?  

I actually don’t like the word mainstreaming. I like gender integration because it requires thinking through which outcome is affected by gender differences or discrimination that need to be addressed, and how one can do that with the right incentives in place. I’ll tell you from having done years of work on gender integration in large bureaucracies, it’s never easy, but the ingredients that are necessary for success are: leadership, structures, policies, and money. And if you don’t have any one of those, it doesn’t work. What’s incredible about the Biden administration is that we had the president’s leadership. He made this a priority as soon as he came into office and said this was a whole of government approach. He set up the structure, the Gender Policy Council in the White House, and the first-ever National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality. And then he put money behind it, with the commitment to double the foreign assistance for gender equality from $1.2 to $2.6 billion in FY23, and USAID and the State Department met that target. 

Much of the money, to be clear, was already being spent to do this work, only it wasn’t being tracked as such. By doing that, we are raising the consciousness and awareness of our colleagues that work is advancing women’s economic security, preventing or responding to gender-based violence or advancing the WPS agenda. This attribution creates an incentive to do additional work to implement the strategy. The president is now looking to increase that effort in FY25 to $3.1 billion, which is another $500 million increase. Another best practice, which I am trying to promote within the department, is an opportunistic approach, which I believe is the most strategic, to support the champions who exist in the department and already are convinced or already have opportunities to make this happen, and really amplify their efforts and support them 100 percent. I then amplify their efforts to convince others to do the same, reward them, and amplify them and their success. That makes it an ongoing process in every organization, which is going to take time until it becomes second nature to think about gender differences as being critical in anything we do. 

This post was prepared with the assistance of Research Associate Noël James.