A year after the #MeToo movement first started, the World Forum for Democracy 2018, from 19 to 21 November, will focus on gender equality and women’s rights, in particular, women’s public, political and economic participation, and on combating violence against women.

Dolores Delgado Garcia, Spanish Minister of Justice, and Marlène Schiappa, French Minister of State for Gender Equality, will speak at the opening session.

Intellectuals, politicians, activists, experts and young people from all over the world will come together to debate the following topics, which will be illustrated live by the French caricaturist and cartoonist, Laurent Salles:

• Women and power: moving towards 50/50
• Time to stop sexism, discrimination and violence against women!
• Women, security and democratisation.

Various roundtables will also take place on:

• Artificial Intelligence and gender (in-) equality
• Do more films by women mean more women’s films?
• Women and migration
• Has democracy failed women? New democratic practices and women’s participation
• Taking action against violence against women and girls
• National policy approaches to achieving gender equality
• Feminist investigative journalism
• Faith and Feminism – Can women gain greater power in religious communities?

Thirteen “lab” sessions, which will address the challenges from different angles and present some measures which have already been implemented, will help to identify a democratic response to the issues raised throughout the Forum.

Participants will hear moving statements from two women, one a rabbi at New York’s West End Synagogue, and the other who was forced into marriage while still a child.

Programme >>