As executive director of UN-HABITAT, Sharif will battle to boost donor funding for the 40-year-old agency, which fell dramatically under former Barcelona mayor Joan Clos. Another key focus will be implementing the agency’s New Urban Agenda, a 20-year vision for sustainable cities, adopted at last year’s Habitat III conference in Ecuador. UN-Habitat predicts the number of people living in cities will almost double to 7 billion in 2050 from 3.7 billion today, with many mired in squalor if urbanization is poorly managed.

The fund has helped prevent millions of unwanted pregnancies and has sharply reduced maternal deaths in childbirth. It is a major advocate for women’s reproductive health. But the fund’s advocacy work also can extend in positive ways into other aspects of a woman’s life, Dr. Kanem said. Its mobile maternal health clinics, for example, are partly meant to give women safe spaces where they can relax and ask questions about anything, she said, including “things that are happening to their husbands and families.”

Ms. Haley, a former governor and one of the highest-ranking women in Mr. Trump’s administration, refocused attention on the allegations against the president by insisting that his accusers should be treated no differently than the scores of women who have come forward in recent weeks with stories of sexual harassment and misconduct against other men. “They should be heard, and they should be dealt with,” Ms. Haley said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “And I think we heard from them prior to the election. And I think any woman who has felt violated or felt mistreated in any way, they have every right to speak up.”

“We’re here because we need to innovate on gender equality,” says Elizabeth Nyamayaro, who heads up UN Women's HeForShe campaign. Making meaningful change, she says, will require something new. “We are here to learn from the tech industry: They are very good at innovation, so what is it we could do to accelerate progress for gender equality?”

1.6 million men have signed up online, including at least one man in every country of the world, and its “Impact Champions” include the presidents of Rwanda, Ghana, Malawi, and Indonesia, among several other heads of state. The issue has also been the subject of 2 billion conversations on social media. But HeForShe is not without its critics. Many in the gender equality community say they would like to see the movement make more concrete demands of its male champions, and have called for civil society to play a greater role in developing and monitoring the movement.

Can we really provide security to the entire population if we have only men working in the security and defense sector? Having in mind the complexity of peacekeeping operations these days, can we provide full protection to everybody, especially the women and children in conflict areas, if we don’t have qualified female and male personnel? The answer is simple– No! New security threats, risks and challenges require new approaches and there is a lot of space for women and men to build and shape our future in a better and more equal way.

"I was reading a very interesting article a few days ago speaking about the way to gender equality and it said, "the good news is that we're moving in that direction, the bad news is that it will take 300 years.' So we really need to introduce some mechanisms into the different systems to make it happen."'

Approximately one in three women will face some form of violence throughout their lifetimes, according to U.N. estimates that Guterres cited in his speech. Forty-nine countries do not have any laws protecting women from violence.

Only about one-quarter believed they knew the maternal mortality rate in their country (the number of women who die from pregnancy or childbirth) or the percent of women in the labor force. One in eight believed they knew how many girls got married before 18. And over half were so shaky on the subject of early marriage that they weren’t comfortable wagering a guess about rates in their own country.

As HeForShe "Champions," 30 men (who are heads of state, business executives, and university presidents) agreed to advance gender equity in their own settings, wherever they might be in the world.