HeForShe Favorite 

HeForShe is a solidarity campaign for gender equality initiated by UN Women. Its goal is to engage men and boys as agents of change for the achievement of gender equality and women’s rights, 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”. Some noticed the contradiction of a campaign for gender equality which only takes action against inequalities faced by women and girls, ignoring problems affecting men and boys.

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.”[9]