Gender Equality on the Global Stage: Reflections from the 70th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women and the NGO Parallel Event

Author Note: Alisha Silkey, Alison Eyring, and Chelsi Campbell are members of the SIOP UN Committee. Sara Weiner is Past Chair of the SIOP UN Committee. Direct correspondence on this article to the SIOP UN Committee at siopun@siop.org.

Executive Summary

In March 2026, the SIOP United Nations Committee represented SIOP at the 70th Session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70) and the parallel NGO CSW Forum in New York City. This article shares observations from those events and identifies opportunities for SIOP and its members to contribute to the global movement for gender equality at work.

CSW70’s priority theme was “ensuring and strengthening access to justice for all women and girls, including by promoting inclusive and equitable legal systems, eliminating discriminatory laws, policies and practices, and addressing structural barriers” (UN Women, n.d., “Themes,” para. 1). The theme reflects a moment the UN characterizes as one where the rule of law is under attack, democratic space is shrinking, and women’s and girls’ rights are being rolled back while justice systems fail to protect them (UN Women, 2026). Legal equality remains structurally out of reach for many women and girls worldwide.

The parallel NGO CSW Forum brought together NGOs and civil society to share progress, highlight data, and advance social justice for women and girls globally. UN Women reported that nearly a quarter of the Member States¹ have identified a backlash against “women’s rights” (2025b), and globally it is estimated that women only have access to 64% of the rights enjoyed by men (World Bank, 2024). Our attendance goals were to understand perspectives from UN Member States and other NGOs, learn about global initiatives promoting fairness at work, and advocate for workplace science that advances fairness and social justice. We encourage all interested members to continue this advocacy and invite those who want to engage directly to contact siopun@siop.org.

Background: The UN Commission on the Status of Women

The United Nations (UN) Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) first convened in 1947 and is the UN’s principal intergovernmental body for advancing gender equality and women’s empowerment. The CSW is a functional commission of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the principal UN body responsible for coordinating the work of the UN system and facilitating engagement with the more than 6,000 NGOs that hold consultative status. SIOP has held Special NGO Consultative Status with ECOSOC since 2011 and has actively participated in the work of UN Women, the UN’s lead entity for gender equality.

CSW70 The Intergovernmental Sessions

 CSW70 took place at the UN Headquarters in New York, NY, from March 9 to 19, 2026. The gathering brought together representatives of 45 Member States (UN Women, 2025a), UN entities, and ECOSOC-accredited NGOs from all regions of the world (UN Women, 2026).

Each CSW produces an Agreed Conclusions document through Member State negotiation, historically marked by diplomacy and consensus. This year broke with that tradition. For the first time since 1947, negotiations failed, and a vote was required. The Agreed Conclusions were adopted 37-1-6, with the United States casting the sole dissenting vote plus six abstentions (United Nations, 2026). The U.S. sought to revert to the binary definition of gender established in the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action, proposing text affirming “two biological sexes” and rejecting “radical gender ideology” (United States Mission to the United Nations, 2026). The majority voted not to consider the proposal. Despite geopolitical tension, the overwhelming majority of Member States reaffirmed their commitment to advancing women’s rights, gender equality, and multilateral cooperation.

The NGO CSW Forum: A Parallel Civil Society Conversation

The NGO CSW is a forum organized by and for NGOs with consultative status to the UN, as well as other global NGOs, civil society, and individuals, focused on ensuring equal protection of rights for women and girls. The following are takeaways from several sessions:

Session 1. Mind the Gap: Achieving Gender Justice in the Workplace

This session was presented by the United States Women’s Caucus & International Alliance of Women. “Women and girls represent half of the population, yet they remain systematically underrepresented in political, economic, social and sporting decision-making bodies. Despite progress in recent decades, parity is still far from being achieved” (European Women’s Lobby, 2026a, p. 1). To address this problem, the session promoted the European Women’s Lobby PARITY NOW! campaign, launched in early 2026, which calls for 50–50 parity between women and men in all decision-making bodies across political, economic, and social spheres (European Women’s Lobby, 2026b).

During this session, the broader global trend of democratic backsliding, which has disproportionately targeted gender equality gains (UN Women, 2025b), was discussed. As gender equality faces one of its most challenging periods in decades, UN Women is calling on governments, businesses, and civil society to reinforce their commitments and push back against the decline of gender justice.²

Actions and Opportunities for SIOP Members

In this and other sessions, a theme that emerged was “data-driven justice,” which refers to collecting sex- (or gender-) disaggregated data to understand the predictors and outcomes of workplace injustice for women. Without this information, institutions struggle to accurately measure women’s contributions, identify barriers, track progress, and design effective, targeted solutions (Le Gall et al., 2026). For SIOP members who conduct employee, team, leadership, or organizational research, this theme aligns closely with our expertise. We can advocate for and lead the ethical collection of sex- (or gender-) disaggregated data to better understand workplace experiences across different types of businesses and sectors, regardless of whether such collection is legally mandated. Sex-disaggregated data are essential for evidence-based policy and program design, helping pinpoint where women encounter obstacles within the economic system and ensuring that those most affected by these systems are not rendered invisible within them (Klein & Marshall, 2022; Le Gall et al., 2026). Armed with data, justice advocates are better positioned to contribute to policy recommendations on justice for women at work within the UN, its Member States, and organizations.

The session also highlighted several actions that NGOs and civil societies, like SIOP, can take:

1. Advocate for the ratification and implementation of ILO Convention 190 (Violence and Harassment), the first international treaty to “recognize the right of everyone to a world of work free from violence and harassment, including gender-based violence and harassment.”
2. Audit organizational policies to ensure they include intersectional perspectives (e.g., protections for migrant women or women with disabilities).
3. Partner with legal aid clinics to provide “Workplace Justice” workshops for female employees in the informal sector (e.g., domestic workers, street vendors, agricultural workers, home-based workers, and other workers who may lack formal employment protections).

Session 2. Reimagining Justice: Decent Work for Women

This panel convened representatives from the International Labour Organization (ILO), the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), and labor unions from Ghana and the United Kingdom to discuss the role of collective bargaining in advancing decent work for women.³ The priorities expressed by the labor organizations aligned closely with two focus areas that SIOP’s UN Committee has prioritized, among others: decent work and reduced inequalities.

In the session, our UN Committee member, Alison Eyring, urged the union representatives and all attendees to draw on decades of science on fair and effective selection, development, and promotion systems, equitable pay practices, and cross-cultural and gendered understanding of leadership. She pointed out that science-informed practices are good for women, lead to better business outcomes, and that “fairness” is a business issue. She further invited the unions to seek out our professional society as fellow advocates for workplace justice.  

Actions and Opportunities for SIOP Members

SIOP members bring expertise spanning the full employment lifecycle, from selection and job design to performance management, compensation, leadership development, and organizational climate, placing the field in a strong position to strengthen organizational justice and reduce inequalities for women at work. SIOP members can network, collaborate, and share evidence across a broader range of stakeholders, ensuring that scientific findings on gender justice extend beyond academic journals and into the spaces where policy and practice decisions are made. Evidence linking the positive outcomes of flexible work (Harrop et al., 2026), caregiver-supportive policies including paid family leave (Bartel et al., 2023), pay equity (Sitzmann et al., 2026), and workplace design (Vilar-Compte et al., 2021) for both women and organizations can be drawn on to make the business case for decent work to elected officials, international bodies, organizational leadership, labor organizations, and other worker advocacy groups. The SIOP UN Committee, given its consultative status to the UN, offers an additional outlet for SIOP members through periodic opportunities to contribute reports⁴ delivered directly to UN committees.

Session 3. Justice at Work: Implementing ILO Convention 190 to Eliminate Violence and Structural Barriers

This session, organized by the NGO Coalition to End Violence and Harassment in the World of Work, reviewed progress and barriers in implementing ILO Convention No. 190 (C190), the Violence and Harassment Convention (ILO, 2019). Adopted in 2019, C190 is the first international treaty affirming every worker’s right to a workplace free from violence and harassment, including gender-based violence.⁵

As of 2026, the convention had been ratified by 50 of the UN’s Member States (ILO, n.d.b), though neither the United States nor Turkey, both of whom were referenced and made statements in the session, have ratified. A Turkish speaker offered a nuanced perspective: Although Turkey has not ratified C190, it has made meaningful progress in aligning national policy with its provisions. So, although some nations may not formally ratify a convention, they can take action and implement the spirit of the convention, sometimes even faster than going through formal ratification. In other words, it is better to implement without ratifying than to ratify and fail to implement.

Actions and Opportunities for SIOP Members

For SIOP members, this presents an opportunity to use our scientific voice to support preventive practices and the measurement of workplace violence and harassment, whether or not C190 has been formally ratified in their own nation or the nations in which they consult. I-O psychologists bring expertise in organizational climate assessment, the design of reporting and accountability systems, bystander intervention training, and the structural conditions that enable or suppress harassment. As the session made clear, meaningful implementation can precede ratification, and SIOP members working within organizations can promote C190-aligned practices at the organizational level even in nonratifying states. Members can also contribute to the legal and policy process more directly through amicus briefs and expert testimony.

 Session 4. Who Fixes the System? Women at Work, Power, and Justice

This session showcased the Australian government’s Rise Initiative (n.d.), a leadership development program designed to promote women into senior roles within the real estate industry. The program featured assigned paid mentors and a strengths-based assessment for participant feedback. Although the initiative exemplified genuine organizational commitment to women’s advancement, it also illustrated a persistent limitation in applied gender equity work: the reliance on individual-level interventions rather than systemic change, and the use of evaluations based solely on participant interviews, with no or poor measures of organizational impact.

The session also featured an informative discussion on intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989), specifically around the importance of acknowledging that women’s experiences of workplace inequality are not monolithic, but they are shaped by overlapping identities, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, and class. Although intersectionality has been integrated in organizational research (e.g., Gottardello et al., 2025; Thatcher et al., 2023), this session was a valuable reminder of its importance in applied and intervention evaluation work, where it can help identify when solutions work for some groups of women but not others. For example, designing a leadership development program for “women” without understanding the experiences of different kinds of women and the impact such programs have on them risks perpetuating the very inequities such programs intend to address.

In this session, there seemed to be an absence of objective behavioral or organizational outcome measures and longitudinal follow-up, making it difficult to draw causal inferences about program effectiveness. Although “program effectiveness” and “evaluation” are recurring themes in UN events, the application of our science in these areas remains limited.

Actions and Opportunities for SIOP Members

As an NGO composed of scientist–practitioners with consultative status to the UN, SIOP can elevate awareness of how data collection and analysis can be used to assess the impact of interventions designed to develop individual capabilities, determine the effectiveness of programs, and evaluate organizational change efforts. This type of contribution has precedent: In 2023, the SIOP UN Committee organized and facilitated a “sounding board” whereby UN stakeholders involved with its #NewWork change initiative met with SIOP practitioners and researchers, who provided expert guidance on measuring the success and impact of the change effort (Olson-Buchanan et al., 2023). The committee has also collaborated with SIOP members to deliver presentations and webinars to the UN Secretariat on fair and effective selection practices, including topics such as mitigating bias in assessment and leveraging recruitment and selection to support diversity goals. As the UN faces its greatest funding shortfall and is actively cutting costs to sustain its efforts, the committee will continue to seek the expertise of SIOP members to provide much-needed resources to promote effective and fair practices during this period of resource constraint. At the UN, the will to further gender equality is abundant; our field can provide the rigor to design, implement, and evaluate what actually works.

Session 5. Women in Medicine: Reflecting on Current Inequities in Medicine

This session was organized by the Federation of Medical Women of Canada and included a panel of surgeons, all of whom are women. In this session, there was a screening of the documentary 1001 Cuts (Temkin, 2024), which explored the experiences of surgeons who are women in a profession dominated by men. The film highlighted the unique challenges women face as surgeons (e.g., gloves that are too big, operating tables set too high, and a greater likelihood of nurses questioning their instructions) while also addressing intersectional issues such as racial bias, discrimination, and broader challenges facing women in the workplace. Based on the panel discussion, it was evident that the extensive research in our field could benefit those working to solve the issues and challenges faced by women in medicine and male-dominated careers more broadly.

Actions and Opportunities for SIOP Members

There is an opportunity for SIOP and its members, building on the impactful work of its Visibility Committee, to continue raising awareness of and showcasing our field of science in the public sector, especially in healthcare. For SIOP members working in or doing research in healthcare, the film 1001 Cuts⁶ is an excellent resource.

What SIOP Members Can Do

As a field, we have an opportunity to impact decent, fair, equitable, and safe work and workplaces for all women. We encourage all SIOP members to keep in mind the following: 

Speak the Language of Business

A powerful argument for gender equality in organizational contexts is presenting the business case for safe, just, and decent work. SIOP and its members can help further these priorities by proactively engaging with businesses and helping them understand the business value of fair and safe workplaces and making it easier for them to create safe and fair workplaces for everyone.

 Be Champions of Rigor

As practitioners, we should celebrate investments in women’s advancement while also holding them to the standards of best practice. Program evaluations based solely on self-report or interviews are insufficient. We must advocate for, and offer to conduct, evaluations that include objective outcome measures, longitudinal follow-up, and, where feasible, control conditions.

Exercise Our Professional Agency

Our science is relevant wherever people work: in hospitals, unionized and non-unionized workplaces, NGOs, government agencies, and community organizations. Building strategic partnerships with labor unions, public health systems, and international organizations like UN Women would extend the reach of I-O evidence into spaces where it is urgently needed. To achieve this, we can exercise our professional agency at the individual level and stay informed on the collective movement advocating for gender equality and, when possible, contribute to the efforts.

Conclusion

The CSW70 and the parallel NGO CSW series were a demonstration of advocacy and unity, while at the same time they were a sobering reminder that gaps exist in creating workplaces that are fair, enable all employees to do their best work, and ensure organizations can take advantage of all the talent available. As a field, we have decades of research and science-based practice, and we can work to increase our influence in shaping decisions that affect the majority of the world’s workers.

We invite I-O professionals who are currently engaged in, or interested in supporting, the efforts promoted and advocated at the CSW to reach out to the SIOP UN Committee. Please share your efforts and ideas, and they can serve to guide our ongoing advocacy for bringing science to work, the workplace, and workers. We can be reached at siopun@siop.org.

Notes

^[1] Member States refer to the sovereign countries that are members of the United Nations. The official list of UN Member States is available at: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/member-states.

² For readers interested in this topic, listen to the CSW70 side event title “Bridging Systemic Gaps: Advancing Justice for all Women and Girls” freely available on UN TV. https://webtv.un.org/en/asset/k1l/k1lgdqr82i

³ To read the official statement from the trade union delegates who spoke at the CSW70 demanding justice for women workers view https://www.ituc-csi.org/IMG/pdf/tu_statement_on_csw70_final_10.10_2025.pdf?43525/47f050e3b6616f9b0fb9e784c7ee545a85449bfa5fd6da104f234de0a40182c3. To learn more about what was shared at this session visit https://www.ituc-csi.org/csw-70-ituc-statement and to learn more about what labor unions are championing this work see https://new.express.adobe.com/webpage/AXDuqacg4TQ6E/.

⁴ For example, in 2016, SIOP UN Committee members Alexander Gloss and Lori Foster authored a policy brief on leveraging big data to support a human-centered approach to sustainable development, which was submitted in preparation for the UN’s 2016 Global Sustainable Development Report (Gloss et al., 2016).

⁵ To access the ILO campaign toolkit to promote the ratification of C190 and learn more about what it entails view https://brand.ilo.org/d/XdDMx745iKTL/events-and-campaigns#/campaigns/c190-campaign-toolkit.

⁶ Here is the link to view the trailer for the 1001 Cuts film https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXS81NOPGu0

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