'Not one country has gender equality,' says UN Women boss

No country has reached gender equality, the head of UN Women says.

It's been 20 years since 189 countries signed up to a plan for parity between the genders, but Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka says none have yet achieved it.

During the conference, in Beijing in 1995, then-US First Lady Hilary Clinton said: "Human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights."

There has been progress, Mlambo-Ngcuka says, but the world hasn't reached "tipping point" with more work needed.

Women in leadership

Mlambo-Ngcuka told Associated Press that a girl born today would be an 81-year-old grandmother before she had the same opportunity as a man to be CEO of a company.

She would also have to wait until she is 50 before she had an equal chance of leading a country.

Mlambo-Ngcuka pointed out that there were fewer than 20 female heads of state and government and the number of women lawmakers had increased from 11% to just 22% since the Beijing conference.

"We just don't have critical mass to say that post-Beijing women have reached a tipping point in their representation," she said.

Violence against women

Both the lack of women in powerful, decision-making roles and violence against women are "global phenomena", Mlambo-Ngcuka said.

"The sheer scale of the use of rape that we've seen post-Beijing [especially in conflicts], I think tells us that the women's bodies are viewed not as something to respect, but as something that men have the right to control and to abuse."

She wants world leaders to speak out "very strongly and very openly" against sexual violence and oppose the denial of women's rights.

Women and reproduction

The conference in Beijing recognised that women have the right to control their own sexuality without coercion. It also acknowledged their freedom to decide if and when to have children.

These issues, which caused the most controversy in Beijing, are still the most divisive during UN negotiations, Mlambo-Ngcuka says.

"Instead of becoming a norm... there has been resistance to those rights - deadly resistance as we have seen now in the Middle East," she says, also referring to the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria who are to to have been sold to men as wives without any rights.

The future of gender equality

Promoting gender equality must become a priority for the world's leaders - and Mlambo-Ngcuka says it isn't right now.

In addition to marking International Women's Day on Sunday, her comments come ahead of a meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women.

They will look at the action plan that was created in 1995 and see what still needs to be done to achieve its aims.

The 150-page document called for governments to close the gender gap in 12 critical areas including human rights, health, education, employment and political participation.

Mlambo-Ngcuka says many of the problems are a result of male domination and the key to equality is for men and boys to give up the privileges of patriarchy that they gain, simply by being born.

UN Women is looking for 10 world leaders, 10 CEOs and 10 universities to "break the mode" and work with their He for She campaign which asks men to stand up in support of equality for women.

If that happens, "we've got something to work with, taking the campaign forward," she says.