GENEVA, March 8 (Xinhua) -- In observance of International Women's Day, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk stressed on Friday that peace could be built only with women as part of the process.

Addressing the Human Rights Council, the UN rights chief said that at the grassroots level, courageous women peacebuilders spurred social transformation, however, at the negotiating table, the voices of women and girls remained marginal.

Rebeca Grynspan, secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), spoke about the importance of investing in women in the new episode of UNCTAD's Weekly Tradecast.

Women and girls made up nearly half of humanity but still lacked equal opportunities in societies and economies, which meant that they often got less access to education and healthcare, were paid less than men, and were more likely to leave work to care for families, Grynspan said.

This week, the UN released a position paper on women, "Placing Gender Equality at the Heart of the Global Digital Compact," to support the preparation of the Summit of the Future due in September, the UN Information Service said on Friday.

The position paper said that progress towards gender equality in technology and innovation continued to be far too slow, across all indicators, and yet, the challenges that underpinned the gender digital divide continued to be treated as a side topic in discussions on digitalization.

In 2023, women represented only 20 percent of employees in technical roles in major machine learning companies, 12 percent of AI researchers and 6 percent of professional software developers, the paper said.

According to the latest Women in Parliament report of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the global proportion of parliament members who are women has inched up to 26.9 percent, based on elections and appointments that took place in 2023.

This represents an increase of 0.4 percentage points year on year, a similar growth rate to 2022. However, the growth is slower than in the preceding years - elections in 2021 and 2020 saw an increase of women parliament members of 0.6 percentage points.

Gender issues dominated many of the elections amid a backlash against women's rights in some countries, the report said, adding that several prominent women have recently left politics, blaming burnout and threats.

An analysis published by Germany's credit agency Schufa on Friday echoed with the international institutions. Only 27 percent of German companies have at least one woman in top management such as a board member, managing director, or owner, almost unchanged since last year, according to the analysis based on the Schufa database of 4.7 million companies. Enditem

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