Dear United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon,
"Get Cross."
"Break the silence."
"When you witness violence against women and girls, do not sit back. Act."
Those are your words, Mr. Ban Ki-moon. As the U.N. secretary general, you have been forward about promoting gender equality and denouncing violence against women. Yet this month, at the Paris Climate Conference (COP21), one of the biggest conferences in the world, where important decisions about climate change and our planet's future are being discussed and debated, very few women participated or had a chance to voice their views.
Mary Robinson, former U.N. human rights chief and first female president of Ireland, put it this way in an interview with The Guardian: "This is a very male world [at the conference]. When it is a male world, you have male priorities."