I kicked off my attendance of the 59th United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW59) first thing on Monday morning by attending a side event about women’s involvement in creating and implementing environmental policy, sponsored by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The high level panel included the Undersecretary of State from Finland and a government minister from Liberia. They were gathered to talk about the Environment and Gender Index (EGI) which measures how well governments are implementing gender in their environmental mandates. “A strong global policy framework,” the IUCN literature points out, “recognizes the importance and promotes the active participation and leadership of women across all levels of decision making-including that on environment and sustainable development concerns.” The as of yet incomplete EGI reveals that “across key environmental for a, less than 1/3 of decision makers are women.”

Not surprisingly there is not an enormous amount of data on the topic. To create their index the IUCN selected countries for whom data was readily available and then created the data for other countries. To be fair, they did weight the index against the data they created. They hope in the coming year, through deeper cooperation with UN Women to expand the EGI to reveal data from all countries in the world.

However, I do not want to focus so much on the importance of gender in economic decision making, though admittedly that is important. Instead, I want to share a couple of thought-provoking statements that were made by the panelists. The first was a statement by a female panelist (sadly I failed to note which one): “If we didn’t have civil society we would have to invent it,” she remarked. I found that to be a very interesting statement, especially as I am someone who believes that God is the original creative author of society. That someone who makes no effort to include God in their thought processes would make the observation of the importance of civil society (And by civil society we mean non-government amalgamations of humanity, you know, those voluntary, informal, organizations and groups) truly points to the creative genius of God, and highlights an asset that Christians all-to-often forget.

The second statement issued by another female panelist (all told the panel consisted of 5 women and 1 man [who was only there because he was filling in for a woman who could not make it]) was more pointed. While countries have made decisions that say there should be gender balance among decision makers, the panelist from the Women’s Environment & Development Organization (WEDO) explained, “That is not enough to undo the hundreds of years where women weren’t present at the table”. That statement seems to express the driving attitude behind a lot of the thoughts and ideas expressed at CSW. The line between equality and vengeance is too often obscured, whether it is in talking about numbers of women in government, or treatment of women in certain areas of the world. While equality, rightly defined and pursued, is something that Christians can and should promote and protect, an attitude of vengeance is something that should cause the careful Christian to stop and think critically about what is really being pursued, and why, in the name of equality.

Featured Image from UNWOMEN.