HeForShe
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| Formation | 20 September 2014 |
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| Founder | UN Women |
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Key people
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Ryan Lennie Simon Pegg Emma Watson Kiefer Sutherland Wolf Blitzer |
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Parent organization
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UN Women |
| Website | www |
HeForShe (often referred to as He for She) is a solidarity campaign for the advancement of women initiated by UN Women. Its goal is to engage men and boys as agents of change by encouraging them to take action against negative inequalities faced by women and girls. Grounded in the idea that gender equality is an issue that affects all people—socially, economically and politically—it seeks to actively involve men and boys in a movement that was originally conceived as "a struggle for women by women".
On the HeForShe website, a map—which uses a geo-locator to record global engagement in the campaign—counts the number of men and boys around the world who have taken the HeForShe pledge, and was used as UN Women worked towards its goal of engaging one million men and boys by July 2015, a goal which they failed to meet. The campaign website also includes implementation plans for UN agencies, individuals and civil society, as well as those on university and college campuses, both through online and sustained engagement.
"Initially we were asking the question, 'Do men care about gender equality?' and we found out that they do care", said Elizabeth Nyamayaro, senior adviser to the executive director of UN Women. "Then we started to get a lot of emails from men who signed up, who now want to do more."
A special event was held to kick-start the HeForShe campaign on 20 September 2014 at the Headquarters of the United Nations in New York. It was hosted by UN Women Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson, whose speech—about her own path to feminism and her call to involve men and boys in promoting gender equality—was widely circulated via social media.
At that event, UN Women made a call to mobilize the first 100,000 men in the campaign, a goal successfully reached in just three days. United States President Barack Obama, actor Matt Damon, Tom Hiddleston, and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon are among some of the high-profile male champions featured on the site.
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Wikipedia